We reached the sweaty, seedy Caribbean coast in the evening after an 11-hour bus ride from Bucaramanga. We threw our things down in Santa Marta, the oldest surviving Spanish settlement in Colombia, a port city still very rough around the edges. Our taxi driver took one look at the hostel we had him drop us at and shook his finger No, don’t stay here. Area’s not safe. We did anyways and the only trouble we ran into was the harmless 16-year-old prostitute who propositioned Andrew, the spitting iguana on a leash in the corner store, and the toothless, shirtless guy who tried to run off with a computer monitor from our restaurant before our waiter cracked him in the face and kicked him back to the streets. Check please.
Why did we bother with Santa Marta? One reason and one reason only: the outstanding trek to the Lost City of the Tayrona.
Back in the mid-1970s, a few graverobbers stumbled upon an enormous stone stairwell in the wild jungles southeast of Santa Marta, and following the steps to the top of high ridges they discovered extensive ruins of an ancient city previously unheard of outside local indigenous circles. Frankie the alcoholic, the lead man on the job, had been dealing local indigenous goods for many years prior, but now had something special. He and his sons kept the location secret while they began selling gold artifacts from the city on the black market, which soon made their way into the hands of archeologists questioning the origin of such rare goldwork. The Spanish had encountered the Tayrona tribes upon first landing in the New World, wiping out most communities while relieving them of their enormous supply of gold, in such abundance that the legend of El Dorado was spawned here. The archeologists eventually met with Frankie, liquored him up, and were told the location of this Ciudad Perdida, known locally as Teyuna. During the 1980s, tourist expeditions began out of Santa Marta; Frankie himself led many of them, with a cook named Alberto. Twenty-five years later, Alberto is now a lead guide, one of the oldest and most experienced in the business. Alberto is now our guide.
We are five: Lisa, from Alaska, unemployed; Andrew, from New Jersey, unemployed; Eli, from Massachusetts, unemployed; Jeremy, from DC, unemployed; Caroline, from Bogota, unemployed. A long, uncomfortable ride in the back of a jeep took us to the start of the trail in a town called Machete, where we fueled up on sandwiches and orange Tang. The first leg of the trail was easy enough, a meandering hike along a quiet river, past abandoned paramilitary camps and old coca farms that had been sprayed with chemicals in the war on drugs, killing not only the coca plants but indigenous crops of avocados and lemon trees. Then the incline began, switchbacks up ruddy, well-worn trails along a steep ridge. Then the rains began, turning said trails into mud waterfalls my treadless sneakers had a hard time climbing. Near the top of the ridge, with lightning striking nearby, we stop for sliced pineapple under a shed; we are soaked solid. Shaggy mountains and valleys to our right and left as we walk in fat drops of rain along the ridge, the trail looking like a sandy Nantucket dunescape at times. Steep declines sent us all to the earth in spectacular comedic wipeouts, clothes and backpacks covered in mud. We reached the riverside hamlet of Adan before the second wave of heavy downpour incited a flash flood, which would have prevented us from crossing the river to our campsite on the far banks. We did our best to get clean using bucket-showers, changed into dry clothes and hung out with fireflies and a giant bullfrog before climbing into hammocks to sleep.
We started our second day with an interrogation: during the first climb, Caroline had given her backpack to a suspiciously nice woman on horseback, seemingly acquainted with our guide, helping to run supplies from Machete to Adan; this woman later handed the backpack to her young helper, a 13-year-old boy, who delivered it to our campsite. At some point, Caroline’s wallet was stolen, with all her documents and money; neither woman nor boy were around that evening when it was discovered missing, presumably gone for good. The following morning, the boy showed up to run more supplies to our next campsite; Alberto sat him down and extracted a sheepish confession from him as we all watched. The wallet itself was at his house in the hills nearby, and the money was in his pocket. Caroline was given back her money and then some, Alberto forcing the boy to give up his own money as incentive for him to return soon with the wallet. He did return, everything now accounted for, but Alberto instructed Caroline to keep the extra cash as the boy’s initial punishment. How often do you get your wallet stolen in the jungles of Colombia and recover it with profit? The boy didn’t seem to understand what he did wrong, and griped about his lost money all day. Though worse punishment awaits, we were told: the Adan area is run (“run” in the mob sense) by a rotund man who was absent that morning, but will be informed of the boy’s infraction at a weekly meeting, at which point he’ll lose his job, or worse, get a severe beating.
Before setting out, we paid a short visit to an illegal cocaine lab, run by one of Adan’s mustachioed entrepreneurs. We followed a path through dense vegetation, the kind of trail you might expect to follow if you were visiting a jungle cocaine lab. The lab was no more than a small clearing covered by a tattered tarp, with various supplies strewn about in the mud. The unnamed Mr. Wizard, age 25, demonstrated the disgusting procedure for turning coca leaves into cocaine, which involved combining leaves with such delicious ingredients as gasoline and sulphuric acid, manually mixing and crushing with a rusty weed-whacker and mud- and horseshit-covered boots, and a series of crude filtrations using stretched t-shirts. The resulting paste is later refined elsewhere into recreational cocaine; the waste product of this procedure is sold as crack-cocaine. Mr. Wizard sells his very small paste batches every few months, taking in a couple extra thousand dollars a year, but he’s mostly removed himself from the business, working now on proper fruit and vegetable farms. An interesting glimpse into the wretched world of cocaine. Our parents can rest easy knowing that neither of us have ever considered the stuff, the Reagan-era anti-drug campaigns were enough to deter us, if not the disgusting processing behind the drug, if not the incredible violence and bloodshed Colombia has suffered as a result of the international and local drug wars. More on that later in the trip.
The day’s hike was a series of ups and downs in the hot sun, the trail making its way past coca fields and cow pastures in some of the most idyllic settings in the country. Lisa, Andrew and I plowed ahead with our cook, Ismael, resting again for pineapple alongside a cool mountain stream. There is perhaps nothing better, it turns out, than pineapple, after a long hike in the jungles of Colombia. Later in the afternoon, because of our late start, the rains caught us. We sloshed our way through a couple indigenous villages, where shaggy-haired jungle sprites raced around thatched-roof mud-and-stick huts in their bare feet and white smocks, asking for candy. Just as the downpour began to pick up, we reached our camp at Gabriel, where we played cards into the night with three Irish girls sporting thousands of fresh mosquito bites, just back from the ruins on their way out.
The final day of approach was extraordinary. An early start ensured us plenty of sun and safe crossings of the Rio Buritaca, of which there would be 9. The trail began with a tricky climb along a rocky cliff, the river rapids below, forcing one member of our party to turn back, Jeremy’s problematic legs unable to navigate the obstacle course of stones and roots. We are now four. Our first river crossing was a refreshing traverse of the deceptively deep and fast-moving Buritaca. With our bags on our backs and shifting stones underfoot, the strong current nearly had its way with each of us. We then climbed a steep ridge, passing stone-faced indigenous families doing the hike barefoot. Scenery at the top was stunning. The trail meandered through small banana plantations and neared the river again, passing another indigenous family, a little girl of about age 7 carrying a rifle over her shoulder.
Soon began a series of 8 river crossings, as we zigzagged up the mighty Buritaca, stopping on occasion to eat and swim. At this point, there was no time to take off our shoes at each crossing; there is something that makes you feel at peace with the world when you can hike out of a jungle and unflinchingly wade across a rocky river in your shoes and pick up the trail on the other side as if nothing happened.
After the 7th crossing we stopped, and suddenly appearing before us was something out of a Tintin book: a steep stone stairwell descending from the mountain wall and ending high on the opposite river bank. In the last hour, there had been nothing indicating that anyone had ever set foot in this part of the valley; the worn trail itself had ended at the first crossing, and we had simply been making our way upstream over stoney shores following Alberto. But here was this mysterious stairwell out of nowhere, camoflaged in its mossy age with the unspoiled jungle on either side of it. You can only imagine how spooked Frankie must have been when he stumbled upon it.
1200 steps up, almost vertical. Each step either carved into existing rock or hauled from the river below and placed carefully in the mountain face. Our excitement was building the same way it did when we climbed towards Macchu Pichu many months ago. At the top of the first stairwell, our first glimpse of stone walls and circular terraces, the first of hundreds, each once acting as a foundation for the traditional huts like those we’d seen the previous day. The complex spread before us along the ridge, spilling into the steep jungle on either side, most of it still tangled in trees and vines. Another 800 steps, including those of what seemed to be a triple-width grand staircase, took us to the city center, where the largest stone wall plateaus held views of the surrounding mountains to rival the setting in Macchu Pichu. Everywhere, carefully laid stone pathways and stairways recall a Dr. Seuss settlement, or an ant colony, paths disappearing into the jungle below or climbing towards surrounding peaks, wrapping around each circular terrace in a vast web. Where are we? It is early afternoon, the sun is still out, and we have reached Teyuna.
Thousands of Tayrona natives once lived here, perched 3,500 feet or so above the ocean; getting word of the Spanish landing on the coast, they fled higher into the mountains as a precaution, their abandoned city eventually sinking into the jungle for more than four centuries. Nowadays, the ruins are home to some 50 Colombian soldiers, stationed here for 8 month intervals, patrolling the surrounding jungle for guerrilla activity. After we bathed in a waterfall (isn’t South America cool?) and explored the ruins, we had a chance to hang out with a couple of the soldiers as the sun set. Richard, 20, and Darwin, 21, hailed from Santa Marta, as did 49 of the 50 soldiers there. They’ve only got a couple months to go to fulfill their service; they seem to like their post and don’t mind their daily patrol hikes. “Todo tranquilo,” they said when we asked if they ever run into any trouble. Save for the snakes, the scorpions, and occasional tiger, so they claim. In general, they are bored out of their minds, and love talking to the few backpackers who come here – the four of us share the ruins with only four or five others from another group. They had a few radios, pet dogs and cats, but were out of good reading material: they specifically asked if we had anything by Che Guevara. Go figure. We gave Richard and Darwin each a deck of cards, and as thanks they took photos with us and let us hold their guns. My first assault weapon! Darwin took interest in my white Peattie-style sunglasses, purchased for a couple bucks on the street in Potosi, Bolivia, so I traded them to him for his battalion patch: Batallon Cordova Mechanizado. Done deal.
We spend the night at the ruins in a sort of tree house, sharing the clothes lines and outhouses with the soldiers. We celebrated our accomplishment with a can each of warm, skunky Aguila beer. I went to bed that night with ankles sore and badly swollen from hundreds of bug bites; I believe they qualified as “cankles.” No rain that night and clear skies the next day for more explorations of the surprisingly extensive complex. Before leaving, we had a swim in what the Tayrona believed to be the fountain of youth, from where we nimbly descended the long stairwell to the Buritaca far below, crossed another 9 times, and swam with indigenous children at various swimming holes near Gabriel. Life does not get much better.
Despite all getting sick from suspected river water in our Tang, we made the long hike from Gabriel all the way to Machete, electing to finish in five days rather than six. Andrew was so weakened by his bad stomach that he hired a mule for the final leg; we all met back up in Machete, where the whole Sunday town was out drinking, including our driver. No matter; he navigated the awful roads out of the Sierra Nevada with precision, the 4WD carrying ten bodies, two of which were riding rear fender. We smell like the dickens.
We rewarded ourselves with four days on the beach, first in trashy, overrun Taganga, then in outstandingly beautiful Arrecifes and Cabo, in secluded Tayrona National Park, where crystal clear lagoons are framed by giant rounded boulders and perfect sand, the kind that’s easy to brush off. Our bug bites healed, my cankles returned to ankles, I got new sunglasses, and our stomachs recovered their Caribbean swagger. We drank cold lulo juices and slept in hammocks and rearranged the list of the best things we’ve done on this trip, making big room near the top for the magnificent trek to La Ciudad Perdida.