Congo River Falls

A map of St. Vincent calls the river "Grand Sables River". I doubt anyone calls it that.

The Congo River flows into the sea at Black Tunnel Beach, just after the underpass and before Georgetown, on the windward side of St. Vincent. My Bequia friend and video producer Eckart Ebert told me that river valley is wild, progress barred by huge fallen timber, and that there were supposed to be waterfalls which he and his fellow hiker never reached. This had to be explored!

Driving up the road you reach, after about a mile, the bottling plant of Mr. DaSilva: The freshest of water is coming out of a hole in a rock wall - ideal for bottling. He has a swimming pool on the premises that needs no maintenance: When he is gone it is left empty, and on weekends or whenever he has guests he fills it: no chlorine, no algae. That's what I like to have behind my house.

Another short while of driving on the paved banana road, through plantations, brings you to another farming compound with coconut and citrus trees - and here you park and start hiking, straight down and into the river. It is not big but very tropical indeed:
Fall 2003

Mostly one can walk out of the water along one of the sides, but sometimes one has to right into the water and chimney up some steeper, rocky slippery sections. Within a short distane I reached the first waterfall (seen on the right in the composite below. Beyond these falls, with a large pool at the bottom, I came upon the section where Eckart had encountered the huge treetrunks blocking his way. Actually, it was just one big breadfruit tree that lay across the river and needed some effort to get by.

Eventually, after about 20-30 min, there was a section where the river came over a rock shelf with pools and steep slippery rock again - and suddenly, around a corner, there was the big waterfall that spelled the end of the jpourney because there was no easy, if any, way to hike past it. The composite picture below gives you some idea about the scenery surrounding the Congo falls - again a place tourists will never know about or see. And of course neither would most Vincentians.

There is a pool, about 4-5 feet deep, at the bottom of the falls inviting a dip. Reaching this spot was less than an hour of hiking and wading.

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