We Are f-stop:  WorLd's highest waterfall with Mattia Bicchi

f-stop customer Mattia Bicchi got in touch with another adventure to whet your appetite to travel. Mattia is professional timelapse and hyperlapse photographer and filmmaker from Italy, now based in London. When he's not creating timelapse videos for clients, he's creating them on his own personal adventures. This time traveling through South America with his wife, capturing the stunning scenery along the way. Enjoy this instalment from Mattia making the journey to Angel Falls, and showing what amazing results can be achieved with a mirrorless set up and compact drone:

 

Words and photos by Mattia Bicchi

My wife and I are currently traveling through South America, making videos and TimeLapse. We recently went to Angel Falls in Venezuela, to get there we took a plane from Caracas to Puerto Ordaz where we stayed for a day to visit the beautiful ‘La Llovizna’ waterfall and where the Orinoco and Caroni rivers meet. 

From Puerto Ordaz we got a small propeller plane to Canaima, a Pemon Village, where we were welcomed by our tour guide that took us to the Ucaima Camp, here we spent one night with an amazing view to the Carrao river and Tepuys. 

The day after, at 6am with a small indigenous boat called Curiara we started sailing up to the Angel Falls, the journey was longer than usual, as the river was low and we had to get out the boat few times and push it against the current with the other guys. After 6 hours and a half we finally sighted the stunning falls from our boat, a scream of joy came from all of us, we never seen something so majestic! 

We arrived at the base camp where we had lunch and got ready for the one hour walk through the jungle, with us we had a Black Loka and a Orange Lotus to carry our gear, the walk to the bottom of the falls was beautiful, we could feel hundreds of insects and birds singing around us, the tough part to walk through the jungle was the humidity, but once we arrived at the Mirador all the tiredness was gone, I took my tripod, my Sony A7rII and started shooting as much TimeLapse as I could, the feeling to be there and seeing with your own eyes this natural wonder so close, is indescribable. I also took out my Mavic Pro and went for a flight, what a flight! 

As the river was low, we were able to go at the very bottom and dive into the small pool under the falls, there is nothing more energetic than swimming literally at the bottom of the Angel Falls! 

We got back to the base camp just before sunset, where the locals made us an exquisite dinner, to finalise our day, we slept in an ‘Hamaca’ under the worming energy of the Auyan Tepuy. 

The way back was a bit scary, as we started our journey during the night, we couldn’t see a thing, but the locals knew the river so well that they were able to avoid all the rocks that could flip over our boat. When the sun went up the journey was quite and relaxing, giving us the time to reflect on the incredible place we just witnessed. 

This is Mattia's second We Are f-stop story - check out his trip to the Faroe Islands with another wonderful timelapse video here. You may find more of Mattia's work on his web site, Facebook and Instagram.