- 'Cmere.' Jenn the Irish girl announces worriedly. - 'Do yous know we have to climb one thousand two hundred steps to the Lost City?'
- 'FOR FECKS SAKE.' Lauren the Irish girl replies. - 'Someone told me it was only twelve fecking hundred.'
We wake early this morning for our final one hour hike up to the lost city. After some energy-filling empañadas for breakfast, along with the energy-sapping news that a landslide a couple of months ago wiped out the log cabaña next to the one in which we have just been sleeping so soundly, we set off along the river towards the 1200 steps that we must climb to see the Lost City. We being all of us except Mogitz the German, who has to stay in camp as he has suspected malaria.
****
A few years from now, Colombia will be a top five worldwide tourist destinations, and there wiull be busloads of tourists being driven along a new highway through the jungle to Ciudad Perdida, where they will enjoy a morning caffeine fix from a Juan Valdez coffee shop at the bottom of the 1200 steps before making the walk up to see the Lost City. Apparently the Colombian government are already waiting for the final UNESCO World Heritage Site stamp of approval before they start piling billions of pesos into the development of the existing site, and excavation of the 80% of the lost city that still remains covered by jungle.
Personally, I am glad I got there before all that. Travellers that I have met that have been to both Machu Pichu and Ciudad Perdida are in general agreement that visiting the latter was a far more rewarding experience because of its remoteness and the challenge in getting there. I enjoyed walking an almost non-existant trail path from our final camp, and clambering on all fours up the 1200 algae covered steps to the top.
It might not have required the same concentrated exhaustion of Half Dome in Yosemite or indeed of some of the volcanos I have climbed on my way down through Central America earlier in my travels, but there was definitely a really sense of satisfaction and achievement in standing above Ciudad Perdida after four days, twelve hours of walking, and about forty sandfly and mosquito bites on my legs. We hiked in rain, walked through ankle-deep mud and waded through waist-high to get here, and the memories I have will remain with me forever.
