All of this, if you're wondering, and since I'm itching to write about it, was part of an excursion to Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall, deep in the Guayana region of southeast Venezuela. Believe it or not, I hadn't gone all this way just to watch airplanes or have lunch at Benihana.

Venezuela is my new favorite country, but a narrative of my trip begins with the sour part: depressingly, and as usual, I encountered almost no Americans. It was Germans, Brits, French and Dutch aplenty, with hardly an American in sight. Help me with this: Venezuela is a three-hour flight from Florida, versus up to 12 from Europe. And what is it with the Dutch? The entire population of Holland is less than that of Florida, yet I've run into hundreds of Dutch tourists in every corner of the world. It's perplexing enough, but in Venezeula, a few short hours from Miami, it's infuriating and embarrassing.

Getting to Angel Falls required the trip to Puerto Ordaz, followed by a drive to Ciudad Bolivar, on the banks of the Orinoco. Ciudad Bolivar -- yet another toast to the General -- is formerly the city of Angostura. Yes, this is where Angostura bitters come from. It's a colonial town with an old historic center -- a cathedral, stuccoed houses of sun-bleached pastels, etc.

From here, a single-engine Cessna takes you to the airstrip at Canaima. The flight lasts about an hour and the scenery is fantastic. Seated up front, I couldn't help but notice that approximately half of the instruments on the Stationair 6 were actually operable, the fuel gauges, directional gyro (heading indicator) and attitude indicator (artificial horizon) not among them. I wasn't worried. These guys are salty bush flyers who know the area cold, and could probably maneuver a Cessna sideways through the fronds of a coconut palm. "Sometimes we fly to the mines," the pilot told me, nodding toward the horizon. "Nine-hundred foot runway." The stall vane on the left wing, I'd noticed, had been jammed open with a wad of paper, to keep the buzzer from sounding during those envelope-pushing approaches.

Canaima is the launching point for the river trip to Angel Falls. This part of Venezuela lies at the edge of what's called the Gran Sabana, an exotic wilderness that inspired the setting for Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World." Jutting from pristine tropical forest are immense flat-topped mountains, some of them spouting thousand-foot vertical waterfalls. Angel is the biggest of these. It doesn't plunge from a river, it comes pouring out of the top of a tepui -- a tabletop mountain rising from the jungle like a gargantuan fortress. Other tepuis are all around. Essentially you're in a canyon, looking up at the falls.

The geography of the area is mind-bogglingly spectacular, and strikes me as a sort of upside-down Machu Picchu. It's nearly as breathtaking, but inverted. Instead of standing atop the mountains looking down, you're beneath them gazing upward.

Angel Falls tops out -- or bottoms out, depending how you see it -- at more than 3,000 feet. That's one of those tough-to-visualize statistics, so think of it this way: At any given moment, hundreds of tons of water are dropping two-and-a-half times the height of the Empire State Building. (Lucky me, I've now stood at both the largest cataract -- Victoria, on the Zimbabwe/Zambia border -- and the tallest.)

And the noise. The sound of all that water splashing 3,000 feet to the rocks is not the sound of some primordially majestic Mother Nature. It's the sound of Judgment Day. The noise does not inspire you; it scares you.

It isn't called Angel Falls for the reasons you're probably thinking. This is Catholic Venezuela, sure, but the name comes from Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who, searching for Venezuelan gold in the 1930s, flew past the falls and brought news of it to the rest of the world. In 1937, Angel crash-landed his airplane atop a tepui not far from the falls. Unable to take off again, he and his party reached safety after an 11-day trek through the wilderness. The plane, El Rio Caroni, was later recovered and rests today outside the terminal in Ciudad Bolivar.

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