Everyone has heard of Machu Picchu in Peru but Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City of Columbia is far less well known despite being 650 years older and also shrouded in mystery.
Unlike Machu Picchu, Ciudad Perdida does not have a bustling town at the base of the mountain with hotels to suit every taste and a bevy of tour buses to ferry tourists to the entrance. There is only one way to get to the Lost City in Columbia……and that is, by foot on ancient paths and tracks hiking through protected indigenous land…and it can only be done as part of an organized guided group on a multiday hike, carrying your own luggage. You have to sweat to earn the privilege of visiting the Ciudad Perdida or Teyuna as it is called by the native people. The companies offering the trip are all based in Santa Marta, a town on the Caribbean Coast so we headed in that direction.
The temperature on the overnight bus to take us from San Gil to Santa Marta was icy especially when compared with the outside temperature of nudging 30 degrees. Some passengers were draped in blankets and one woman was wearing a wooly hat covering her ears. The journey was supposed to take fourteen and a half hours but although we left San Gill almost an hour behind schedule, we still reached Santa Marta an hour ahead of time😲We were tossed and tilted on our reclining seats and would have certainly landed in the aisle if we didn’t have seat belts especially for the first few hours. Maybe it was a blessing that it was dark and we couldn’t see the road but overall it was a relatively comfortable if chilly journey at a cost of €25 each but we saved on a night’s accommodation.
Santa Marta is a ramshackle sort of place where the drivers were unusually courteous, stopping to let us cross the road unlike those in San Gil where crossing the street was an adrenaline-fueled adventure. It’s a beach town and a busy port with a huge basilica, the oldest colonial town in Columbia (founded in 1525) and the place where Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America died in 1830 of tuberculosis (although his cause of death is controversial, as most things are in this part of the world). Santa Marta could also be called the windy city, a warm gusty wind blew up in the afternoons and evenings which was quite welcome although it stirred up the rubbish and swayed the trees.
But for us, Santa Marta was mainly our gateway to the Lost City. There is no competition between the tour companies that organize trips to Ciudad Perdida. They have all got together to form a cartel of sorts, they have the same itinerary and charge the same prices, a whopping 2 million COP per person (€500 ), a price that has doubled in the last year. As the 4 day or 5 day tour cost the same price, we opted for 5 days (we have time on our hands😄), starting the following day. If you book online, its even more expensive.
In the office of Expotours at 8.30am, a motley group of strangers looked around, assessing the people they would share the next 4 or 5 days with. Caoimhin and I were by far the oldest, most being in their twenties and thirties.
There were Germans, Canadians, a French woman, two English girls, a Colombian couple with their thirteen year old son but surprisingly the largest representation of any nationality was ….the Irish. There were four lads from Galway who were at the start of a 5 month stint around South America, there was Joe from Belfast and the two of us, the Elder Lemons.
A couple of jeeps took us on a bumpy ride for a couple of hours into the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains to begin our trek. After a lunch of rice, salad, beans with natural juices and an orientation talk, we were on our way with Spanish speaking guides and English speaking translators. The midday sun beat down on us and the trail was a mixture of exposed sections where the sweat dripped from us, drenching our t-shirts and welcome shady sections through forest and a canopy of trees where we encountered a dead snake on the path.
The 7 Kms on the first afternoon took about three and a half hours including a stop for a swim and another to eat thick slices of luscious watermelon, the stony paths mainly climbed upwards except the last section which was steeply downhill to our first campsite. This was an open-sided galvanized-roofed building with a kitchen, rows of long tables for meals, rows of bunk beds, some cold water showers and flush toilets. The river, a faint gurgle from the camp was downhill where we had a swim in a refreshing deep pool before dinner and looked at the huge water spiders (apparently harmless ) which rested on the large mossy rocks.
On that first afternoon a pattern was set that would continue for the following days, the Galway lads who were all GAA players with bulging muscles, set a blistering pace, egging each other on until even the guide was a perspiring heap and the group was stretched across the trail.
Our second day began with a flickering of lights in the dorm at 5am and a lot of groaning. All the damp sweaty clothes from the day before were still wet. It had rained during the night and the air was humid. It was still dark outside and drizzly. Breakfast was papaya and melon, scrambled egg, arepas (a Colombian bread a bit like a Mexican tortilla) and sweet fruit bread. The Galway lads were in flying form, messing and slagging each other, even at this early hour in pre-dawn darkness, woofing down any leftovers with gusto.
We crossed into indigenous land with thicker jungle and shared the trail with the natives wearing their white traditional dress, often herding a black pig on a leash or accompanied by laden mules. We jumped when a huge jackfruit dropped from a tree and split open with an almighty splat in front of us. We passed a small village of round thatched houses with black haired children playing outside, crossed rivers and streams, swam to cool off in dappled water with leaves constantly falling from the surrounding dense foliage. It felt almost like a different dimension, another world, with no cell phone or internet coverage – the guides communicated with each other on walkie talkies. ‘Happy Hour’, the name that the guides gave to the intense uphill stretches, began that day after a huge lunch of lentil soup with lumps of corn on the cob floating in it, veg stew (or chicken stew for the carnivores), rice and salad, finished off with a small packet of oreo biscuits. We staggered into our small camp at about 3,30 pm after a long and pretty gruelling 17 kms to be greeted by reviving coffee and hot chocolate and enormous trays of salted popcorn. The food prepared freshly by our cook, Petrona, was tasty, filling, plentiful and very much appreciated.
We slept that night in bunk beds under mosquito nets in another open-sided structure to the sound of gushing water from the river a few meters away. The guide had warned us to shake out all blankets and all clothes before putting them on……just in case. The just in case was left hanging tantalizingly in the air without further explanation. The following morning, Joe who was in the bunk next to mine, felt something on his back when he was getting dressed. He brushed it away, but it was a scorpion which strung him on the finger. Everyone was shaking out their clothes and checking shoes after that and thankfully Joe was fine, with minor swelling and numbness.
The third morning, we entered the Lost City after clambering over boulders by the river. crossing a rickety rope bridge and climbing 1200 steps to the site which is sacred to the indigenous tribes who close the site to visitors every September for the whole month to perform sacred rituals. It felt like an achievement to be there, a place that was ‘lost’ for so long, abandoned about 400 years ago and swallowed by the rampant growth of the jungle and rediscovered in the 1970s although the indigenous knew of its existence all the time. For many years after that, it was off limits for visitors, too dangerous to visit for this was drug country, an area that has known appalling bloodshed, ruthlessness, and greed. Tourism is an opportunity for change, for a new beginning and for a good livelihood not based on the cultivation and processing of drugs.
At the top of the steps, we reached the initial settlement which consisted of several large stone circles with low stone walls and some towering trees reaching to the heavens. There was an air of tranquility in this majestic setting of misty tree-clad mountains, our group were the only people there, except for birds, a trio of dogs and an army of mosquitoes, intent on breakfasting on us despite the copious amount of repellent that wafted off everyone. The site kept unfolding, becoming more impressive the further we walked until we were in front of the giant terraced platforms, that climbed one above the other, concentric circles. There was the shadow of a huge buzzard overhead, a bird that in indigenous folklore were messengers between the spirit and the human worlds. The sun slowly rose to warm the site and bathe the stones in warm sunlight. Soon the heat intensified, and it was time to reluctantly retrace our steps. back the way we had come, navigating the 1200 steps which seemed even steeper on the descent.
On the fourth morning, the 4-day and 5-day groups parted company. The Galway lads and an Englishman had signed up for the 5-day hike but changed their minds, deciding that they couldn’t take any more with sore muscles and blistered feet. Caoimhin and I continued for another day with the Colombian family.Our young friends awarded us ‘warrior status’ for our endurance but the old dog for the hard road.
This fourth day with a smaller group was all about rivers and waterfalls of all types, gushing curtains of water, or water falling like gentle white rain watering a wall of exotic green plants. We crossed and recrossed the Rio Buritaca several times, more times than it seemed possible to cross the same river. We crossed with steping stones, rope bridges and once and best of all in a rope pulled ‘cable-car’, standing on a timber plank, swaying above the foaming water. The Columbian family and the guide chatted as we hiked. Although our Spanish is still not good, we can understand more than we can speak. When I couldn’t understand anything, I longed to earwig on conversations and know what people were talking about. We discovered that their chat was almost exclusively about food, what they ate and when and what they would eat again and we thought that we were missing out on deep meaningful conversations or at the very least, a bit of gossip.
On the fourth night and in a bunk bed in a camp by the Rio Buritaca (yes, that same river), we slept for a solid ten hours, both body and mind in need of rest. Our fifth day was easy, a two-hour hike through former coco plantations back to where we had started walking five days before, but we weren’t the same people, our muscles ached but our heads were full of memories of a mysterious city in the mountains that was lost and found.
What else might be out there waiting to be ‘found’?
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