Santa Marta and the Lost City (Ciudad Perdida) trek

We took a bus from Cartagena to Santa Marta so we could go on the famous Ciudad Perdida hike. Santa Marta isn’t overally impressive from what we saw, but the hotel we stayed at was near the ocean and the sunset was amazing.

One of the major cool things to do in Colombia is the Ciudad Perdida trek. It’s basically Colombia’s version of Manchu Picchu: an old civilization ruin on up in the mountains in the jungle from somewhere around 5th Century A.D. It was only discovered in the 1970’s and for a while people were fighting over it before the government stepped in. I think it’s only been safe to go up there since the late 80’s, but even since 2003 there had been some cases of tourists getting kidnapped. It’s different now. In fact, almost every backpacker we ran into in Colombia had done this trek or was planning on doing it at some point. I think the only danger might be having a heart attack on the hike or going off the cliff on the crazy bus ride up and down to the starting point. Anyways, we decided to do this because it’s much cheaper than Machu Picchu and less touristy and heard of (although it could very well become the next Machu Picchu by the way things were looking). It cost us about $200CAD each for a 6 day, five night hike with guides that cook three meals a day and donkeys that carry out the hammocks and other essentials. The only thing you carry is your backpack with clothes and camera and any hiking gear you’d feel that you want.

Check it – I have uploaded quite a few cool pictures of this trek since I did this post. Check out my Flickr Photostream.

We got to see a lot of these types of views.

These donkeys are at least… two times as strong as I am.

This is one of several fruit stop points along the way. There are also several places where the indigenous folk sell Gatorade from small huts along the way. Unfortunately I would later lose the only pesos I brought along in a poker game and have no money for the sweet sweet electrolytes.

On the trek you see many real indigenous families who truly live off the land in this region. These kids spent hours swinging around on this vine. These people (as well as our guides) carry around a traditional sack of coca leaves and the alkaloid that activates them. Im sure it takes the edge off the trekking. These people often run around the trail barefoot and eat monkey.

We had to cross rivers. It was pretty extreme and I craved a Mountain Dew. This is an earlier picture, but by the end we just left our shoes on and walked right through.

There were ferocious beasts on the trail. This picture was taken moments before I wrestled this vicious panther to it´s death.

This is what the camps were like. This is the first camp and it´s the nicest. You can actually buy beer and other drinks here and the locals even carried up a pool table. The camps thereafter would not have such things.

A rather jungly view.

No jungle hike is complete without learning how cocaine is made! For $10 extra a former cocaine-making-man shows us how it´s done. My Spanish wasn´t good enough to understand everything he said, but luckily a member of our group translated some for us.

So from what I gather the process seems to involve getting some coca leaves and some gasoline and mixing it all up with other chemical shit in dirty buckets.

or you be Brianna and just start gnawing on the leaves. Please leave a comment if you think she looks like a giraffe-girl.

Almost there… just got stir it up a little (but not too much – really he said you can ruin a whole batch if you don´t know the art of the ´stir´

and filter our the unwanted dont-get-you-high junk….

and we have coca paste! This is almost the final product. After this point they basically just need to dry it out (and do one last filter). Apparently it was cool to roll cigarettes in it and smoke it or put it on your gums and let your face go numb. I tried a little and immediately killed someone.