The Lost City

The trip was billed in the guide book under the "off the beaten track" section as "a week long Indiana Jones-style trek to the remains of an ancient culture hidden deep in the jungle." Hmmm... OK, sold. Thus, my friend Jessica and I last Tuesday embarked on our six day trek through the wilderness north east of Cartagena in search of the "Ciudád Pérdida" or "Lost City." So named because after the Spanish slaughter of the ruins' original inhabitants, the Tayrona peoples, the city was engulfed by the jungles' encroaching tentacles and not discovered again until the 1970s. "There were lots of Marijuana farmers in the area," our guide, Enrique, told us, "but then, in the 70s, the government started spraying campaigns to eradicate the fields, and so the people started looking for other forms of income." One of these sources happened to be pre-Colombian ruins grave robbing. Thus, the discovery of this 11th century gem in 1975--perhaps the only inadvertant positive outgrowth of the endless "war on drugs."

By chance, it happened that Jessica and I were the only members of our trek. Thus we, along with our guide Enrique, took a tail bone grueling two hour truck ride from the town of Santa Marta, to the isolated pueblo of "Machete"-- the ominously named set off point for our journey. A crowd of bored, camo-clad soldiers stood guard at the entrance to Machete to search our bags. They held their machine guns lazily, and generally appeared unenthusiastic about their assignment. One knew a bit of English, however, and decided to show off as he rooted through our underwear searching for the atomic bomb we no doubt had stashed somewhere in our hiking boots. "So! Is that your brother?" he asked to Jessica, motioning to me. I glared witheringly in response to his vocabulary error, but, eyeing his massive weapon, held my tongue. The first day's hiking was gruelingly steep, but mercifully only a few hours long.

At the apex of our assent, we paused to admire the 360 degree view of endless rolling green mountains surrounding us.

"This all used to be cocoa plants," Enrique informed us casually as we surveyed the vista. "It's only since December that they've been destroyed."

"Wow!" I remarked. "This is much much land for to be saying goodbye to the cocoa. And the government comes with the planes full of the make sick, and put on the ground from the air?"

"No no," Enrique said. "No, they did it by ground."

"And hows about the farmers?" I asked. "Whats they uses now for to make of the money?"

"Uhhh... " Enrique said, pausing as he though. "I think... nothing? The government doesn't come with the subsidies, so the people eat less. OK, enough rest! Let's go!"

We got into "camp" around four, and were eager to partake of the nearby crispy fresh river bed which also served as a shower. Our accommodations for the evening consisted of an open air roof, which stood over our waiting mosquito net adorned hammock beds. While we waited for our dinner to boil, a couple of curious locals approached us to converse. Apparently, an idealistic New Zealander had fallen in love with the area while on the trek, and had decided to move permanently into the community (thus, increasing the overall population by about 25%), and offer English lessons to students in the humble local school, and to aspiring guides.

"Will you quiz me?" A friendly 19 year old asked in Spanish, shoving his small notebook towards me. The book was full of simple begining exercises distinguishing the singular from the plural (ie- "I want a woman" vs. "I want some women") and conjugating basic verbs (ie- "We have no money" vs. "He has guns"). The older man had a thin, paperback "teach yourself English" book which was full of useful phrases. Each phrase was written in Spanish, English, and then followed by helpful pronunciation guides. The guides, though phonetically correct based on Spanish pronunciations, appeared at first glance to be a rare German dialect. For example:

Help = "¡jelp!"
-I'm being chased! = "¡Áim bin chéist!"
-Get the hell out of here! = "¡Guet de jel áut ov jier!"
-My denture is broken = "Mái déncher is bróuken"
-I´m caughing a lot = "Aim cófin e lot"
-I have cut myself = "Ái jav cat maisélf"
-Bunch of crooks! = "¡Bonch of crucks!"
-I've got to protect myself= "Áiv got tu potéct maisélf"

We had another hilly day of hiking the following day--passing periodic camps of soldiers stationed along the trail as we walked. Their headquarters consisted of basic camo-decored tarps draped over saplings. Not surprisingly, they seemed deprived of stimulation, and thus greeted us with frenzied, caged-primate-like salutations of enthusiasm as we passed. Though our group was small, there was little opportunity for true silent appreciation of the jungle around us due to a combination of Enrique's incesant whistling disorder, and my constant nose blowing--the result of a recently and ironically (given the stiffling hot climate) incurred cold.
The 19 year old pupil from the night before had helpfully diagnosed me after one of my particularly aggressive bouts of sneezing.

"Dengue!" he'd told me, knowingly. "Yup! You have Dengue fever!"
"Don't be saying this," I'd chided him, seriously.
"No, it's Dengue!" he'd insisted. "There's a lot of it in the area. First there's the cold, then the fever, then the sweats, then...." he waved his hand dismissively and ran a finger across his throat. "Poof," he finished ominously. I crossed my fingers that he hadn't been Harvard Medical School trained, and thus his diagnostic powers might be lacking.

As we hiked along the second day, we passed several indigenous Kogui communities, whose humble, archaic looking villages suggested a marked dissociation from the reaching tentacles of modernity. Their homes were small, circular thatched huts, fortified along the walls with dried mud. The men wore plain, calf length long sleeve tunics that, though once white, had long since been stained the hue of cream-heavy coffee. Beneath their tunics were long similarly colored pants. The women wore long, white toga-style wraps, and the children whatever random scraps of clothing were left over, if anything. Passing one of these villages, we came across two knee-high girls carrying back a ten foot long tree branch to their waiting, machete-wielding parent. The two children looked like twins--no older than three. They smiled shyly at us, and Enrique engaged in a series of affectionate maocking bird calls with them that served as a kind of coded jungle salutation.

As we continued on our walk, Jessica and I marveled at the spectacle of toddlers engatged in hard manual labor, and the strk contrast such an ubringing presented to a coddled American childhood. A friend of mine worked as a counselor at a "Safety Town" day camp in highschool, and most parents wouldn't even enroll their offspring at age three for fear they were far too fragile and inmature. There must be a middle ground...We finally arrived to the famed "Ciudád Pérdida" on our third day, after a hilly trek and eight river crossings. An easy to miss bank of stairs led steeply up to the hidden ruins from the river, and without Enrique there to spot it, I probably would have missed the entrance. We climbed the moss covered stairs for half and hour before reaching the first level of terraced ruins--circular stone mounds that once were the foundations of homes.

We continued to wind our way through the many levels of jungle ensconced neighborhoods before finally reaching the upper most level. Here, the jungle opened up, and two grass covered Olympic swimming pool sized circular terraces stood treeless, affording magnificent views of the surrounding jungle, which stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. The ruins are patrolled by several platoons of soldiers, who ostensibly are there to protect the site from further grave robbers, and/or secure tourists' safety. There haven't been any conflicts in the area in the past two decades or so though. Thus, the soldiers have little to do but sit around, polish their guns, and play checkers. The scene, with its abundance of aimless troops with little concrete sense of their mission, surrounded by jungle, was eerily reminiscent of images from Vietnam. Minus the Spanish, of course.

Due to their bordem, the troops often filter in to the tourist area at night, seeking entertainment. It's amazing what an olive branch a deck of cards can be. Jessica and I started rousing games of "Cuarenta" ("40"), a popular South American card game, and thus made fast friends. Antonio, a 26-year old commander who looked about 19, was my partner, and was fast to catch on. He flashed his winning braces-adorned smile (with green brackets to match his camouflage's fatigues) when ever he scored us points. His machine gun stood propped against our picnic table, and Jessica, forgetting the word for it in Spanish, asked him:

"Can you move your... uh, how do you call that again in Spanish?"
"Oh, 'my toy'?" Antonio asked, gesturing towards his weapon.
"No! It's not a toy!" I insisted, "she means, what's it's name?"
"Oh, I see!" He said, the mystery clear now. "I call it 'my girlfriend'!"

We decided to change the topic.

As the night wore on, we grew more and more comfortable with our card playing friends, and started using the informal "tú" form.

"Gimmie that!" Jessica demanded to Antonio, when he misdealt the cards, and she had to recollect them, ripping them from his hands.

"Geez," he said, sighing. "You handle me like a doll."

When Wilston, the perpetually cheating soldier seated beside me looked at my hand one too many times, I punched him, chidingly on the shoulder.
"Stops that, yous!" I demanded.
"Ouch! Don't hit me!" he wined. Baby.

Indeed, most of the friends we made there did not fit the stereotypical macho image of a Colombian soldier, and seemed actually quite delicate. When the topic of favorite sports arose, Antonio's eyes lit up when Jessica mentioned yoga. "Me too!" he said enthusiastically, and demonstrated his flexibility by touching his nose to his knee. When I said soccer, he stared at me blankly. "I never played that," he said, unenthused. "All that kicking... I don't get it!" Go figure.

Later, as I was trying to concentrate on my Cuarenta strategy, Jayan, the soldier seated to my right, kept handing me the headphones to his minature MP3 player to play me a selection of his favorite songs. I nodded unenthusiastically and gave feigned thumbs up signs to most of his Latino music selection, but one song made me do a double take.

"What?" I said turning towards him suddenly. "Is this Enya?!?"
"Yes!" he said, pleased I'd recognized it. "She is one of my favorites! Very peaceful, no?"
She must have the biggest cross-over appeal of any working musician if she is counted a favorite amongst the ranks of granola-crunching New age Zen masters, Tolken worshiping Lord of the Rings fanatics, and M-16 toating Colombian early 20s males.

We had a full day to hang out and explore the ruins the following day. The other tour group that had been there the night before left in the morning, so we basically had the whole place to ourselves. Enrique walked us around through the maze of jungle covered stone pathways, explaining a bit more about the history of the site. Of greater interest to me, however, were his casual tales of his previous carreer before becoming a naturalist guide, as a workerbee in an illegal cocaine processing warehouse. What a natural carreer progression.

"It was a really good job!" he said enthusiastically in Spanish. "Of course, we had to work by night, but we were all good friends there. There were twenty of us that worked inside the factory, and fifteen that worked outside as guards. And, it was a little dangerous, I suppose." I asked for elaboration. "Well, for example, two days before I started my job there, a group of FARC guerillas raided it by night and shot seven people. Young people too--like 17 or 18. My friend was working there at the time. He had to run into the jungle and hide to avoid being shot. After that, he was a little traumatized." Understandably. I naively asked him why, given that this tragedy happened just before he started work there, he took the job. He looked at me with condesending pity and enunciated slowly, as if talking to a mentally impared recent stroke victim: "Di-ner-o." Each worker was paid 2,000 pesos per kilo of coke they processed each night, and on efficient nights, they could process over 100 kilos. That translates to 200,000 pesos, (about $117 dollars) for one night's work. Not bad, especially by Colombian wage standards.

He said he quit not because of the risk, but because the boss of the warehouse was killed in a car crash in Venezuela and after that, the whole opperation fell apart.
"Did you not know who was above your boss then?" I asked.
"Bah," he said dismissively, with a wave of his hand. "Some guy in Medallín. Who knows."

As we continued walking along the path, we saw a small cocoa plant growing wild in the shade of a nearby banana tree. It had delicate little green leaves, and seemed such an innocuous specimen of vegetation to be the cause of so much ruckus.

We completed the trek out back to Machete in two days--there was more down hill on the return, so the going was a bit easier. We finally got back into Machette on the sixth day--exhausted, parched, and ready for the (by contrast) insane luxury of the hostel that awaited us back in Taganga. It was thus an unwelcome suprise at first to learn that the tour company had deemed our group too small to warrent the cost of a jeep coming to pick us up, and so instead, we would be making the long, bumpy ride back to civilization on the back of motorbikes. Resigned, Jessica and I donned more sunscreen and our shades, securely fastened our boots to our backpacks, and hopped on our awaiting charriots. Once I found a grip that alleviated my fear of being bucked off the back, I actually found the ride quite pleasant, and the stunning greenery of the surrounding hillsides--dotted intermitantly by large, pink flowering disiduous trees--a treat indeed.

Back in Taganga, we showered, enjoying a scrumpteous dinner, and moseyed back to our hostel where we found a small group of people in the common lounge area watching The Godfather, one of my all time favorite movies. Sometimes, life is perfect. Of course the town suffered another of its frequent evening blackouts before we could finish the film, but it was about 8:30 by that point anyhow, so it was high time for bed. Ah, Colombia.