Story: Ciudad Perdida & The Mosquito Trail

The Mosquito Trail
By Rory Faulkner
May, 2008

There exists an ancient lost city so beautiful, so mysterious, and so remote that only the most ambitious of the world’s travelers find themselves there. Few, if any, tour agencies know it even exists. It rests on the side of a jungle mountain flanked by a soaring waterfall and can only be reached via a strenuous six day return trek through the steamy jungle. Columbia’s ‘Ciudad Perdidia’, or ‘The Lost City’, offers South America’s most rewarding adventure. Discovered only in the 1970s and overlooked by the world as Columbia’s drug wars raged, it is now accessible to those intrepid travelers looking for the true Indiana Jones experience.

Ancient ruins across the globe draw hordes of tourists all longing to look into the past. From Guatemala’s Tikal to Peru’s Machu Picchu, from Egypt’s Great Pyramids to Cambodia’s Angkor, ancient cities allow us to climb around like children and let our minds wander. We pay our entrance fees, board buses, shuffle around with the masses and frame our pictures to exclude the other tourists and the souvenir shops. However, the nuisances of established tourist destinations do not apply at the Lost City. There are no buses, no roads, no entry gate, no restaurants, no trinket shops, no beggars, and best of all, no pushy touts. Only a single muddy trail still used by Indians grants access to this secluded treasure. The difficulty in reaching The Lost City ensures that it will remain commercial free and a truly abandoned destination for years to come.

While on our yearlong honeymoon around the world, my wife Amy and I decided to get off the beaten path and seek out this daunting trek. We hired a local guide in Santa Marta, a city a few hours northeast of Cartagena, to take us to the Lost City inside Tayrona National Park for a total cost of $460. The two tour agencies in town, Turcol and Sierra, will provide the guide, a porter, and a packhorse. Excited and a little worried, we departed on a Sunday morning with our porter, Giovanni, and another traveler, Allert, from Holland, who would turn out to be our interpreter and a good friend.

About an hour’s drive from Santa Marta we reached a dirt road and met up with five boys on motorbikes who would drive us and our food to the trailhead. This treacherous fifty-minute ride offered our first glimpse of the beauty to come, presenting lush forests and magnificent views of the blue Caribbean Sea. I watched Amy cling to the boy on the motorbike as we wound around the hills and streams, finally making it to a huge tree that shaded several camouflaged soldiers. The sight of my blonde wife in this dark place surrounded by men with machine guns made me cringe. Are we about to be the next FARC kidnap victims? Will Oliver Stone be making a movie in a few years about our tragic deaths at the hands of cocaine terrorists? Na, these paramilitary soldiers only wanted to check our trekking permits. The sight of soldiers became normal after spending three weeks exploring Columbia. In Santa Marta, I noticed no less than four soldiers on each intersection in town and it was common for them to pull every male off the bus for routine searches. They searched me for drugs and guns three separate times, but Amy and I liked this show of force because it gave us the confidence that the government was now firmly in control of most of the country. We experienced a Columbia that is much safer than the world is aware. The days when Pablo Escobar would reward any thug who killed a cop are long gone.

The boys dropped us off at the trailhead in a small village where we met our guide, Alfredo, who has lived in the Columbian hills his whole life. He had cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a machete, a horse, and looked like a movie star with his killer smile. His poor horse was loaded up with camping gear and food to last a week before we began our journey. As we walked into the forest, we witnessed the return of several other backpackers from the same journey. They periodically stumbled out of the jungle exhausted; beat up, filthy, covered in mosquito bites, rashes and blisters and all complained in misery. Amy and I looked at each other with deep concern. Will she be able to handle what was ahead? Will I? Will she still love me after dragging her around the hot sweaty jungle for six days? Only time would tell.

By noon, the sun was punishing us. We were only carrying small backpacks with minimal clothing and gear but we were already soaked – our hair, shirts, shorts, and even our shoes were dripping with sweat. And this was just the beginning. Along the trail, we passed a few locals who live back in the hills. They were of Spanish descent, lived in houses made of mud or block, and have families, livestock, and horses. Each home is about a kilometer apart and is typically perched on an amazing cliff with views of the mountains and rivers that would demand top dollar back home in San Diego. The children are educated at home and live simple lives with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Families grow fruits and vegetables in addition to raising chickens and hogs, but all grow Coca, Columbia’s finest. Yes, coca fields are everywhere back there but the government does not seem interested in removing these small fields. Perhaps they have bigger fish to fry over in the Amazon basin.

Many years of use and rain created a trail so eroded that portions of it were just deep ravines with high mud walls on either side. After encountering an irritable, pregnant cow that almost refused to let us pass through, we took a break on a steep coca field. Giovanni began to explain to us that he used to be a coca farmer, as was Alfredo and most of the people living back there, including the Indians. He gave us his simple view of the international war on drugs and it was easy to empathize with him. “We are poor. There is high demand for the product, so why not make some money?”

We arrived at Alfredo’s house after three hours of a grueling up hill climb. There was still sunshine left and arguably more time to hike, but no one wanted to move another inch. His house would be our home for the night. Alfredo explained to us, through Allert of course, that this was where many tourists decide to turn back. He said they often spend the night and hightail it out the next morning in fear of what lies further ahead. We were tired, but turning back was not an option for this determined group.

Once I had finally cooled down and reclined in my hammock as the sun set, I heard a terrifying squeal on the other side of Alfredo’s house. I jumped to attention out of fear and went to investigate. Three boys, who I assumed were Alfredo’s sons, were holding down a huge hog and a fourth was holding a bloody knife. Oh god, I thought, are they killing this poor hog to feed us tonight? I moved in closer and to my horror, these boys sliced open the hog’s scrotum and squeezed out a testicle. It was an agonizing 10 minutes of high-pitched squealing, and then they started in on the second testicle! I will never forget those awful screams. Allert was crossing his legs in sympathetic pain, Amy was yelling from the side of the house pleading to know what terrible thing was happening, and the children were all laughing in hysterics at the silly tourists. It was quite a scene. As it turns out, a pig’s balls need to be removed otherwise the meat will taste like urine. Christmas was just over a month away and this unlucky hog happened to be the future Christmas ham.

Alfredo’s sunset views were magnificent. We watched the chickens play in the tree branches and chased away palm sized beetles. Amy was particularly fond of Alfredo’s 2-year-old grandson who she designated as Poopy Pants. This tike was full of smiles and loved to run up to her, giggle, and then relieve himself. With no diapers back in the forest, the family was on constant poop patrol, for the child needed changing at least every 20 minutes. We ate by candlelight and headlamps that night and talked with the curious neighbors until 9pm before heading back to our hammocks. Other than the cow who wandered into Amy and me in the middle of the night and the 3am obnoxious rooster, we slept like babies.

In the morning, we set out for another climb but made a short detour to visit a hidden cocaine-manufacturing pit. It seemed as though it was just set up for tourists, but for $10 each Alfredo’s sons demonstrated how to make cocaine and even offered to let us test the raw product! We declined. What was alarming about the whole cocaine process was that the coca leaf is only a minor part of the final white powder. The other ingredients, including large amounts of gasoline, are mostly household chemicals. The sweaty boys used dirty filters and filthy bottles on a mud floor under a mildewed tarp that no helicopter from above would ever spot. All of it was sketchy and disgusting, but I will admit it, pretty Miami Vice cool at the same time.

We soon passed the final house on the trail as we moved further into the jungle. After a few hours of ascending and descending tricky ridges and swimming in crystal clear streams, we encountered the first Indian village. Their straw huts are the same type that existed in the Lost City 1,000 years ago, perfectly round with thatched roofs made of dried leaves. The Indians were only about four feet tall and looked identical regardless of sex or age. They were brown, had long straight black hair, and all wore the same clothing that looked like a canvas bag. They sat in the dirt and stared at us with no emotion as we passed. They often followed us on the trail, stopping when we stopped, and then following again. One late night I awoke to find two Indians in our camp, watching us with blank faces lit up by the flow of the fire. Alfredo explained that the pouches they carried contained coca leaves they continually chewed and therefore no longer required sleep. While I found the Indians to be creepy and I did not trust them, they did add to the mystery of the whole place.

We settled in for camp on the second day in the early afternoon just before the rains started. The boredom of the night and the scratching of bites started to get into my head. Why were we putting ourselves through this horrendous trek? Not even volcano hiking in the Philippines, mountain climbing in Ecuador, or Peru’s Inca Trail could prepare me for this heat stroke. So far, the mosquitoes were invisible yet every inch of our bodies were covered in hundreds of bites. By now, I had decided that if Machu Picchu has the ‘Inca Trail’, then Ciudad Perdida has the ‘Mosquito Trail’. Astonishingly, Giovanni and Alfredo were untouched. They explained that people who live in the rain forest develop immunity to the bites early in life so the bugs eventually stop biting them. We decided from then on we would wear long pants and shirts while we hiked and two pairs of pants and a jacket at night to reduce the bites, which did help a bit. Amy increasingly voiced her annoyance with her swelling ankles and demanded that we stay in a resort when we get back to Santa Marta. I totally agreed. I wanted a feather bed, room service, and a shower just as bad as she did. However, we had seen some of the most spectacular scenery imaginable; waterfalls, raging rivers, swimming holes, deep green forests and vines on trees that lookes a thousand years old, tremendous mountains and deeper ravines, sunsets and the afternoon cooling showers. This was why we were there - the beauty, the challenge, the reward.

The third day of hiking was relatively flat but technical. We left the packhorse back at the camp and Giovanni and Alfredo carried the remaining supplies, as tough and fit as they were. We hung on to rocks high above the river and walked on tiny ledges; one slip meant a painful plunge into the white water. We crossed the river nine times that day over six hours. We held our packs above our heads and helped each other through the current, but we all loved it because the refreshingly cool water eased the heat exhaustion.

After we watched a pack of wild pigs feast on a tree blown apart by recent lightning, we stopped for lunch next to a waterfall. Then Alfredo pointed to a dark spot at the edge of the river and smiled. There it was, the entry to the Lost City, visible only to someone who lives in the forest. Mossy green steps rose steeply from the river up the canyon wall. We hiked straight up for an hour, growing more excited with every curve and bend. I thought that if these tiny steps have lasted a thousand years, then the city above must be incredible. However, we were all well aware that the homes the Indians lived in vanished long ago and the stone structures they built to support them were all that remained. The ruins themselves, though over 1,000 years old, would not compare to Angkor or even Tikal. Angkor’s ruins are probably the finest in the world but Cambodia’s beggars and in-your-face street peddlers will limit one’s enjoyment at the ruins. Machu Picchu’s Inca Trail may be grander but the crowds are so large that park administrators have to turn trekkers away even with a 500 person per day limit. The Lost City’s draw, however, was the chance to ponder the ways of the past in total isolation, to take part in an expedition that few others attempt, to test our strength and will.

We finally arrived at the first commercial area of the city and had to take a step back in awe. The first level contained many large platforms with beautifully laid stone circling each one. There were enormous rain forest sized trees covered in strangling vines, palm trees, and the dripping, buzzing sound of a million plants and insects in full symphony. Trails of stone were going in every direction. The lone groundskeeper had maintained some of them, but most had simply disappeared into the thick vegetation. We continued our ascent into the city’s main square, which was by far the most beautiful area and where the Indians chose to build their greatest structures, tiered one on top of the next up the mountain. From this point, we could see for great distances and the green and steep mountains all around promised further ancient communities yet to be unearthed. The cities greatest attribute though was the colossal, mountain-high waterfall that seemed to fall from the heavens it was so high above the city. The cascading water ultimately made its way into the city creating more swimming holes and waterfalls and provided the clean fresh water of which we had been drinking directly from for three days.

The Lost City is so extraordinary that it is impossible to put its beauty into words. I am fascinated by ruins and have traveled the globe to see the greatest the ancient world has to offer and I believe The Lost City and the Mosquito Trail deserve to be on the short list of the planets best. I quickly proclaimed to Amy the place worth every mosquito bite. She humorously disagreed, but she was obviously just as fascinated. The rains began soon after so we settled in for a night of popcorn, cards, bugs, and another great meal set up by Giovanni. We spent the fourth day swimming in the “fountain of youth” and exploring the city with Alfredo. He explained, through Allert, the history of the Indians and the deadly story of the grave robbers who discovered the city in the 1970s. We spent the fifth day walking back the distance that we covered on days two and three and then stumbled out of the jungle on day six as battered and beaten as those backpackers we saw a week earlier. We had done it! The Lost City! The Mosquito Trail! We were now a part of the fearless few who have experienced a place like nowhere else on Earth.