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.
