Guyana travel guide: Home of the world's largest single-drop waterfall

Officially there are no hurricanes in Guyana. The strange and little-visited former British colony on the north-eastern shoulder of South America has many challenges, and experiences two rainy seasons every year, but mercifully hurricanes are fated to occur further north.

Unofficially, however, there's a sort of hurricane every single night. I'm an hour by small plane to the south west of the unlovely Guyanese capital of Georgetown, standing on a cliff edge. In front of me stands the sensational Kaieteur, which at 226 metres is the world's largest single-drop waterfall.

I am utterly fixated with it, unsure of how best to take its photograph, when my guide Kenneth Shivdyal asks, "Have you had a look at the sky lately?" Sky? Hasn't he seen these falls? A little irritated, I look up.

Above, a thousands-strong swoop of swallows is gathering, twisting and turning in fluid unison, moving like the world's most graceful pantomime horse. After seeming to reach a critical mass, the swifts start to plunge down, racing at the falls. Some fly behind the great curtain, but others seem to fly right through it, absolutely determined to make it to their nightly roost.

Despite it happening daily, few people have had the privilege of seeing this – Guyana gets a startlingly tiny number of tourists. Estimates put numbers under 4000 a year, a fraction of the number who visit far more seemingly extreme destinations, such as Antarctica.

The majority who make the effort to come to the country do at least also make sure to come to Kaieteur. Located in a national park of the same name, the falls are just a 15-minute stroll from their dedicated airstrip – there's no epic jungle trek to get here unless you want there to be.

Shivdyal and I are doing something a little different by staying in the park's lodge. It's a battered old place to which you need to take your own food and water, but at night you can hear the falls from your bed. In the morning, the building is often shrouded in mist generated by Kaieteur. Everyone else on our plane simply went back to Georgetown after a two-hour tour.