Water flows over these hands.May I use them skillfully to preserve our precious planet. — Thich Nhat Hahn
On Thanksgiving, my flight from Medellin to Santa Marta was a quick zip at under an hour, and unlike the chaotic holiday travel traffic in America, there was none in Columbia.
With the Santa Marta airport seated on a finger of land jutting out into the Caribbean Sea, the azure water filled my window as we landed and I saw large tanker ships floating on the horizon and disheveled wooden boats that looked deserted. Primitive palm frond shacks lined the hazy beach as weary food vendors prepared their beach bodegas for the day.
Santa Marta is a peculiar embodiment of this part of Columbia. Against the beauty of the Caribbean Sea, this fractured city embodies the same phrenetic pace as Medellin. Just like anywhere in Columbia, motorbikes zig-zag over the motorways, competing with taxis and cars and pedestrians.
Across the street, unfinished structures burst from dirt and sand and bags of trash line medians. Stray dogs dig through mounds of discarded chicken carcasses, their thin ribs protruding through filthy wooly pelts.
On another corner, shiny new shopping strips thrive with roaming security guards patrolling the property of a 24/7 fitness establishment and restaurants. Vacant lots, fenced off with colorful graphic advertisements of the up-and-coming buildings, exist in nearly every corner. Santa Marta, the unfinished city, is booming.
The cement and steel-barred homes on residential streets blare salsa music and kids run naked on upstairs balconies as dogs whine and bark. A young mother appears from a doorway and calls to the street. “¡Vamos! ¡Ven a desayunar ya!” Come eat breakfast.
Children appear from shadows playing hide and seek. An older child drops to the sidewalk and crawls like a snake, while another hides behind a car in the street as she eyes the snake-boy.
“¡Vamos! ¡” The mother calls again. The children jerk into formation and run to her.
My destination in Santa Marta is an arduous, fifty-mile, four-day hiking journey to visit the Lost City (La Ciudad Perdida), in a section of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range.
Twenty-six miles from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the Sierra Nevada features peaks reaching 18,700 feet, and it’s the world’s highest coastal mountain range. After walking over fifty miles through a punishing, humid landscape often called “the Green Hell,” filled with mosquitos and insects and creatures I’ve never heard of, I’d be climbing 1,200, tiny moss-covered stones to 3,800 feet to reach La Ciudad Perdida.
It was one way up and one way down. If you tumbled from the steep stoned steps? This was sacred land, and helicopters disturbed the ancient spirits. Your body strapped to a mule, it’s a two-day journey to a primitive hospital hut made from palm leaves and mud. I did not plan on falling.
For centuries, La Ciudad Perdida remained hidden deep in the Columbian jungle. Built around 800AD (some 650 years before Peru’s Machu Picchu), it features approximately 170 stone terraces carved into the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where houses once stood, with intricate, maze-like plazas and streets.
Like the Indiana Jones movies, greed helped uncover this ancient city in the 1970s when gold statues and jewelry crafted in the Lost City began appearing on the black market. Finally revealed by archaeologists, the refurbished jungle covered steps and the entire City remains a testament to Columbia’s diverse history.
The Mamey Region
The drive from Santa Marta to the first base camp is a bumpy two-hour drive in an old Nissan minivan. We stop to pick up migrant farmers headed to the region, and soon young children and other hikers from Bogata, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands— all of which I’d have fascinating conversations with — pack the seats.
The van climbs up, up along dirt roads as the Buritaca River roars perpendicular. The roads narrow and dip, the van lunging like a pirate ship in a storm. Finally, around noon, we arrive at the Mamey Region camp, eat a lunch of rice, chicken, and corn bread, and prepare for the first day’s trek to the next camp.
I prepared for my trip with minimal provisions. I’m using only water to hydrate and the pineapple, mango, and watermelon offered between camps. No fancy electrolytes and other gizmos like the other more seasoned hikers have. My fancy hiking poles? A single bamboo stick.
The trek is already punishing in the first hour. We cross streams and mud-filled gorges, some so narrow I can barely squeeze through, then head ninety degrees straight up for over an hour. My pack weighs around twelve pounds, and the humidity, heat, bugs, and dampness takes its toll on me. I push forward, up, then level on a straight path, then again up another gravel-filled road where gaining footing becomes extremely difficult. I slip more than once on the mossy stones.
While I trained for this trip, I quickly surmise that more cardio training would have helped. I didn’t account for the elevation or the intense humidity. But I quickly recognize the agility training I did for weeks has helped, as my joints feel good. Remembering the “sherpa” trick my Budo teacher taught me years ago, this journey gave the chance to test it again.
Sherpas — guides that lead hikers up Mt. Everest — use a cloth strap that wraps around their head, then to whatever load they carry. It distributes the load across their bodies, allowing them to carry incredible weight straight up the mountain.
The physiology is that the “pull” up an incline comes from the occipital (back of the skull) and back. You envision being pulled up along the same line as the sherpa’s cloth. Employing this intent, it made my up hill hiking lighter, and downhill easier.
Five hours into the first day, I’m winded, and the humidity is overwhelming. Wild pigs and chickens scurry across my path, and the constant presence of mules coming up and down the roads carrying supplies for the farmers.
Motorbikes thunder down the hills — it’s another way the farmers get from place to place — and some have beautiful, black-haired women in black dresses and gold jewellery as passengers. Some carry televisions and appliances to the puzzlement of physics, the passengers gripping the packages and somehow holding on.
The Kogi
The indigenous people who still live in the area, descended from the Tairona era of the Lost City, are called the Kogi, but we also meet the Wiwa, the Arhuaco, and the Kankuamo peoples on our paths. Their cylindric straw and mud huts (the same design of the terraces in the City) line the deep valleys and barefoot women swaddle babies as they hop down steep, rocky embankments without a grimace.
Dressed in white tunics to represent the blessing of the earth and with long, black hair, they smile and greet us as the children trail behind, staring curiously at us.
The men and boys carry intricate fabric satchels called Tutu Iku. The men often keep dried coco leaves in them and when they passed me, I’d see them chewing the leaves (my guide insisted it gave them energy, and nothing more, but let’s be realistic. It’s cocaine and it’s why they smile so much).
Historically, these simple farmers created an intricate system of agriculture — from cocoa to coffee to trees — as well as irrigation and engineering that would leave most modern-day, tech-savvy engineers scratching heads.
While the area thrived until the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century, the Columbian government now works with the indigenous people today to promote tourism and agriculture (although the cocoa leaves are still under comprehensive control by the government). The Lost City guides are all funded by the Columbian government.
Mula!
We begin each day with breakfast at 5:30AM and are on the trail by six. Trails narrow into crevices and mud shales lined with jagged stones, loose pebbles, and mula dung. We round a corner and the guide calls “Mula!” again and we stand aside, away from the cliff edge so as not to be pushed over by the large packages they carry.
I gave up trying to dry my clothes in the evening and accepted wet socks and smelly shirts and pants, now covered in mud and mule crap. A cold shower after each day is a reward.
A swim in the chilly, breathtaking Buritaca River at the second camp provides a welcome reprieve from the humidity. The water is sparkling clean, with a riverbed of unique, colorful rocks. Large boulders line the river as though placed in exact spots along the twists and turns of the water.
Back on the trail, Leafcutter ants carry large slices of colorful leaves cross the rocky paths. Able to carry more than fifty times their own weight and known for sixty million years as farmer ants, the large slices of colorful leaves seem to levitate across the rocks and I’m careful not to step on them and disrupt their morning work (although they are known pests that can strip a tree overnight).
Mountain Parrots and Musician Wren, birds I never knew existed, call out as we walk. Some melodies, like those of the Musician Wren, are so unique it’s as though a human were in the brush whistling the tunes. It’s hypnotizing and I stop often to listen.
Monkeys leap from tree to tree, cackling like children, and although I don’t get a direct view of them, I hear them thrashing through the canopy.
By the second camp on the second day, I ceased asking the guide about the day’s terrain. It was, “We go straight on a path, then it’s up a bit,” or, “We climb.” Yet it was always the words up and climb. Each day proved more punishing than the last, but it was the eternal, jagged, uphill climbs that were most torturous.
Pedro, one of our local guides, is one of the most joyous Columbian men I’ve ever met. At night, his kind, rotund face tells us stories about the Lost City and in the mornings he wakes everyone up from the cacoon of our mosquito-netted bunks with a rompus, “Vomanos! Vamonos!” Even while climbing uphill for hours, he smiles. It was annoying as hell.
It’s the rainy season in Columbia. The rain begins at dinner and continues all night, the lightning and thunder flashing and tumbling until dawn. It would be a treacherous mud walk in the morning.
The Lost City
On the third day, the final almost five-hour course to the steps of the Lost City was perhaps the most unique and difficult. We push through narrow, cobblestone veins that crossed small creeks and spin up into canyons with gorgeous views along the river. We still climb.
The thorough rain last night produced thick, quicksand-like mud, now even more effervescent of mula crap, and now as we moved uphill we stepped and sank into the mud almost to our knees as we maneuver pebbles of different sizes. Around every corner, the terrain shifted from mud-shale cliffs to narrow crevices textured with banyan tree roots, then climbed straight up a rocky path with sharp drop offs on both sides.
I looked to my right down the impossible cliff. I couldn’t see where it ended because of the thick, green vegetation, but if anyone slipped off, I was certain they would disappear, never to be found.
The viscous mud changed our energy expenditure. Now, we had to use muscular force to pull each step from the goop. This third day would prove exhausting. The wet moss combined with mud became like a thick oil slick over the rocks. It was tricky moving up and down the terrain, and each step took careful placement and focus (mine remained on my knees, as it was the perfect setting for a knee cartilage tear).
At last, the 1,200 stone steps were before me and I took one glance up the narrow, steep incline and noted that the stones seem to get smaller as they rose into the clouds. One stone at a time and you can go anywhere, I heard a guide say.
With no railing and increasingly slick rocks, I stepped carefully and again recalled what my Budo teacher told me. Sink to the earth like a mountain goat. Be heavy yet float. As silly as it sounds, this advice got me up into the Lost City.
Before the first step, I closed my eyes. I was entering sacred land. I wanted to set my energy respect while on their ground.
Experiencing La Ciudad Perdida was as though I touched God. Standing on the first terrace and peering up at the next green masterpieces rising to the clouds, I felt an enormous peace settle into my body. These consecrated grounds were silent and comforting and mind blowing in their magnificence.
Pedro showed us an enormous boulder on the second tier served as a map. Chiseled with lines representing paths and rivers across the mountains, stars and moons blinked from the stone. It was incomprehensible that the Tairona people mapped the entire Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta — accurately and to scale— into a piece of rock, and that they included the moon and stars!
Sitting on the precipice of the highest terrace, I looked out over the green expanse of the Lost City and into the horizon of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. I thought about my deep conversations on this journey with people from all over the world. One thing was certain. The global consensus of the future was that of an anxious uncertainty and fear.
I close my eyes and say a Buddhist prayer, hoping that the Mamo (Chief of La Ciudad Perdida) hears it.
Wishes for all beings to be freed from suffering, and for those who are afraid to be no longer afraid.
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