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Lost City Trek
I was picked up at 9 from the office of Magic Tours and we spent 2 hours travelling to the start of the trek in a 4x4. Luckily as I had arrived with some random english girl they assumed we were a couple and gave us the front seats which was immensley preferrable to riding in the back where the offroad track meant we were bumped around alot. Two amusing points on the drive were when we stopped briefly for our driver to collect a machete from a man at the side of the road and when we stopped off for fuel and the guy who was refilling the jeep from a can whilst holding a lit cigerette in the same hand. We got to base camp and had a brief lunch involving a lot of Golf source and then headed off to do a first days hiking for around 3 1/2 hours. It was tough work for me having not done a huge amount of hiking before but it was good to get stuck into some excercise. We got to our first campsite just before dusk which comes around at about 6pm, but not before getting soaked in rain storm.
The first night was in hammocks and was my first hammock experience - as we were camped right by the river it was pretty loud at night though.
The next morning everyone was up early for breakfast as we had the option of going to a Coco Cola factory (or something like that) to see how it was made. Unfortunately as I had only been able to nod and smile when the nice spanish speaking lady explained the tour to me I didn´t know we needed money for these ´extras´ - after all why wound I have needed money in the jungle. Those who went said it was more of a small hut than a factory but seemed nonetheless enlightened by their experience. Meanwhile I had been grumpilly eating my breakfast and cursing Anna Maria for not knowing any english.
The next few days of hiking were fairly light - although the hiking itself was up and down some tough inclines and through some rough terrain, there was only about 3 hours of it and we were finished before lunch most days. Despite being in the jungle these were some pretty incredible views and the river crossings made for an interesting was to break up the day as we got to swim in some natural pools or use pullie system to get over a bigger valley.
Some of the trip was through or near to FARC terratory so there were a number of Colombian soldiers lining the route. They seemed happy enough to see us and were very polite, although I did have my reservations about just how competent they would be at protecting us. As some of them were crossing one of the rivers one rookie was dangling his machine gun in the river. Another day on of them was having trouble negociating a particularly tricky rock so he handed me his grenade launcher while he climbed over.
There are quite a few groups at various stages on the hike at any one time. We were in a group of 13 with a guide called Nicolas and a Chef by the name of Lewis. They only spoke spanish, but even so why found them facinating characters. Nicolas and another female guide didn´t look like atheletes but left us in their dust on the up hill stretches. On the night before we got up to the final trip up to the city, we were able to get Nicolas to tell us about the time some tourists were kidnaped off the trek in 2003.
He did this in quite some detail. This is from memory but hopefully fairly true to what he said but I take no responsibility for this:
At the time the left wing guerrilla group the ELN were unhappy about the way that right wing paramilitary groups were getting preferential treatment in terms of healthcare and schools etc. and decided to take some hostages to make a political point. At the time right wing paramilitary groups were in control of the area around the lost city with the approval of the police, but one night the ELN came into one of the camps pretending to be the paramilitary and kidnapped the tourists. There was originally a group of 13 but only eight were taken up into the mountains. According to Lewis this was because of the other 5, one was an Iranian couple, one guy had diarrea and there were two Austrailian girls that were too fat to go.
Eventually they released the 8 after about 3 months they released the tourists, who told the government they had had a great time. They had been well fed, had had plenty to drink and smoke and had enjoyed the fact they had paid for 6 days and got over 100 days. This was something of PR nightmare for the Colombian governement who eventually had to do something about their ties with the Paramilitary. So they bought all their leaders big houses and gave them legitimate jobs then shortly afterwards rounded them all up and had them extradited to the US on drugs charges.
Anyway, back to the trek...
We did the last trek up to the city early on the 4th day. I took about an hour to get up there, part of which included over 1,000 steps. The views from the lost city were pretty amazing as you can see from the pictures, even if there wasn´t a great deal to the site. Archeologists believe there is still around 14/15ths yet to uncover, however the native people are strongly opposed to this due to the amount of grave robbing that happened during the initial dig. All the same even taking into account a lot of mosquito bites and being soaked for quite a lot of the time it was pretty amazing. So I´d recommend it to anyone.
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