We take off in a small plane that heads over the Atlantic. Guyana is at that point on the north coast of South America where the Caribbean Sea turns into the Atlantic Ocean, but it’s as Caribbean as any island. There’s loud music, spicy cooking and people who are both laid-back and argumentative, whose skins are the colour of coffee - from black to milky, through a hundred different shades.

Down below us the water is a dirty brown with splashes of white from the graceful sails of fishing boats. They race along like windsurfers as we bank and turn back inland, across the Demerera River and over the plantations of the sugar that borrowed its name. There are also rice fields before we reach the rainforest proper, a journey that doesn’t take long no matter where you are in Guyana - rainforest covers 75 per cent of the country.

‘I’ve just realised what it looks like,’ my neighbour says. ‘Broccoli. Isn’t it just like masses and masses of heads of broccoli?’ This seems a brilliantly original observation, till we discover that anyone who has ever flown over Guyana refers to its rainforest as ‘the broccoli’. Even Prince Charles, when he visited the country earlier this year, apparently made a similar remark. Between the broccoli are occasional rivers, slinking through the green landscape like silver snakes, glinting in the sun. Here and there are gaps in the trees: a gold mine, a diamond mine, a cattle ranch. We keep flying until we find the forest opening that marks the air strip for the Kaieteur Falls. As the country’s number one tourist attraction, the falls might get a hundred visitors on a busy weekend.

Our guide, Sohan Bramdo, greets us off the plane and leads us through an initial patch of devastation. ‘It’s terrible,’ he apologises, ‘but when Prince Charles came to visit someone decided it would be a good idea to chop down lots of trees and tidy the jungle up a bit.’ Thankfully, only a tiny fraction of the forest got ‘tidied’ for the royal visit, and soon we’re in among the trees, picking our way along a rough track towards the world’s longest single-drop waterfall.

‘There are jaguars around here,’ Sohan tells us, ‘but they usually only come out at night when the last visitors have gone.’ He stops by a large spiky plant, in the centre of which a little pool of water has collected. ‘Look,’ he says, pointing at something the size of a thumbnail and gold as a nugget. ‘That is the golden frog. It lives all its life in these plants, which are called tank bromeliads, the largest bromeliads in the world. The frog is poisonous and has a toxin that can knock people out for two to three days. It slows down the whole metabolic system... It’s used in Haiti by voodoo practitioners, who put people into a zombie-like trance with it and then use their "magic" to bring the person round when the toxin is wearing off.’

We emerge from the trees on to a rock that’s level with the top of the falls a few hundred feet away. It’s an awesome sight, the more so for being so sudden and so unspoilt. There are no safety barriers or fences, just a few signs warning you to keep eight feet from the edge, which everyone completely ignores.

The drop at Kaieteur is 822 feet, or five times the height of Niagara, and though the Angel Falls in neighbouring Venezuela also claims to have the longest single drop in the world, it can’t match Kaieteur for the sheer volume of water that plunges down into a wooded gorge. Caves behind the Kaieteur Falls are home to hundreds of thousands of swifts, and great flocks of them screech and fly below us. As we walk round towards the top of the falls, the noise of the water increases like an approaching tube train thundering down a tunnel.

Everyone edges forward to look over and watch the water as it tumbles through space with a powerful grace. A hundred feet or so upstream from the lip of the falls is a young man by the name of Rudolph. His skin is as black as coal, his voice a quiet whisper with a lovely Caribbean lilt. He lives nearby, in a village. ‘I come to sit here because it’s beautiful,’ he tells us. ‘It’s peaceful. I come to look at the sky and the water.’

By sky and water is how most people have to get about in Guyana, as there are few roads other than that which pushes south through the jungle all the way to Brazil. We fly out of Kaieteur, then drive this road for a few hours before taking a boat on to Iwokrama. The Iwokrama Centre for Rainforest Conservation and Development is the place where Prince Charles was made an honorary chief, where he donned his headdress of eagle feathers and attempted to dance with the native Amerindians. This ensured he appeared on every front page and every news bulletin in the country, although very few of these ‘news’ reports actually bothered to say what Iwokrama was and why the Prince of Wales was there.

Iwokrama is a unique experiment and a generous gesture by the Guyanese government, who have given almost a million acres of pristine rainforest to the world. Anyone can apply to visit, whether to study the forest or simply to take in its beauty. In 1993 the United Nations donated US$3 million to get the project off the ground and assist in the building of a field station, with simple accommodation for the scientists and the few tourists alike.

Scientists are currently examining the forest to see how it can be used and sustained. Local Amerindians are trained as rangers, and one of these, Daniel, leads us on a morning walk to the top of Turtle Mountain, on a path that he himself dug out in 1994. It’s about a mile and a half long, and climbs up above the canopy to a viewpoint that shows us the Essequibo River cutting a swathe through the broccoli below. Over the greenery, but way beneath us, a light-grey figure soars. A king vulture, says Daniel. Iwokrama is also home to the harpy eagle, the world’s largest bird of prey.

Here too are snakes and caymans, and animals like the agouti and the tapir, the puma and the jaguar (pronounced emphatically ‘jag-WAH’). A 1999 survey found 114 species of reptiles and amphibians in Iwokrama, 11 of them new to science. Only 700 freshwater fish species exist in the whole of North America, yet 420 were recorded in this spot in the middle of Guyana. There are 83 types of bats, the highest concentration in South America. On a night-time boat ride we see the red eyes of caymans floating by the river bank, a tree boa draped over a branch, and the eery ghost bats skim around us like spectres in the night.

Iwokrama is worthy, but rather too worthy - on our return to the field station we discover there’s nowhere to get a drink. A few discrete enquiries reveal that up the river is a bar on Captain’s Island, so we persuade one of the local boatmen to drop us there for a few hours. When we turn up at the open-air bar, the owner fetches a table and chairs for his unexpected visitors and then charmingly flourishes a table cloth. We assure him it isn’t necessary.

Beers and rum and cokes mount up on the table, and when Bob Marley comes on the sound system a guy named Panto sees me swaying and drags me on to the dancefloor. ‘In Guyana we all dance together,’ he tells me, his eyes a rum-filled glaze. He pulls up a local girl and we move to ‘One Love’, though any romantic thoughts on this tropical reggae night are lost when she starts picking her nose. Panto is swaying too, though more from the booze than the music. He leans into one of my pals: ‘You want intercourse with my woman?’ My friend assures him that, although she is very nice, it’s not quite what he has in mind. No offence. More rum arrives.

When Bob Marley’s ‘Greatest Hits’ has been round twice and is replaced by Bob Marley singing the same songs live, we wobble our torch-lit way down to the jetty, only to find our boatman has been and gone. A couple of guys sitting down by the water mention he’s gone home to get some sleep. ‘They’ll be okay, they’re having their fun,’ he’d said. So we turn and climb back up to the bar until the boatman decides to collect us. Then we prove that one commodity not sustainable in the rainforest is the stock of rum on Captain’s Island. Next day we learn from our driver that we’d drunk them dry. And they hoped we’d be back.

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