Social Jaunt: June 2014

After a short flight from Medellin to Santa Marta I arrived at a dream of a hostel, and a great spot for relaxing before a 4 day hike into the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The Lost City treks starts at a small town nicknamed 'Machete' (it's actually called El Malmey) due to the towns reputation of locals drunkenly holding machete fights in the streets, my guide, Carlos, told us there were many deaths amongst the young men and severed digits of the people who tried to get involved.

We set off from Machete around 2 pm, full of anticipation to get going and make it to the 1st camp for the night. I didn’t look up details or read about other people’s experiences of this trek so I really didn’t know what to expect, so when we stopped after about 40 minutes to swim in the fresh water river I was pretty happy, little did I know that we have an hour ascent, the hardest part of the trek, yet to come.

Yes. It was hard. I think I got my first blister on that part of the trek. After the initial pain and suffering of having to walk uphill for over an hour the scenery is worth it and the path gets easier, allowing us to pick up the pace abit. We did 6 km that afternoon and arrived at our camp, Alfredo, at around 6 pm.

Day 2 involved a 14 km hike to the base camp near the Lost City and after an awful night’s sleep in a smelly hammock, this, to me, sounded horrible.

This day ended up being my favorite, after walking over fields and mountains we eventually hit the jungle, making the heat more bearable and the sounds around us more interesting. At lunch Carlos took us on a cliff jumping tour of the river which was hilarious, he is like a big kid (with a machete).

We got the chance to meet the (spiritual) Shaman who actually looks like Naboo, the Shaman off the Mighty Boosh, but with abit less bling. I bought a handmade bracelet off him and he said this would bring me luck, so I'm not taking it off.... apparently he predicted that a village would be flooded and told one of the kids to go and tell them, when the kid went to the village they told him to stop being silly and to go home, they didn't move and a year later they were wiped out by a flashflood, Carlos also told us that he has predicted that 3 Cities on the coast will be wiped out by a Tsunami, including Santa Marta.

Anyhoo.... Day 3 involved getting up at 5.30 am to start trekking to the Lost City for 6 am. We climbed 1200 steps before 7 am! I have NEVER done that before and will probably never do it again (I mean exercise before 7am not climbing steps).

The Lost City is massive, the area that everyone takes pictures of is where the richest people of the City used to live and this is the most maintained area, it is also used as a heli pad for when politicians want to visit.

There is so much interesting history here, but I’m not going to tell you, you should just go! Our guide, Carlos has been running tours since 1982 and is also a local farmer, he has hundreds of stories from the area and the history of the Ciudad Perdida, plus he is a funny man (I think. He spoke Spanish and I did not). Enjoy the pictures!

Having spent around 35 hours travelling on 5 different aircrafts across the atlantic and down the east coast of America I was pretty happy to be in Medellin, Colombia! Wasting no time, we booked onto some parapenting over the City. The cost was around 80,000 COP ($40 USD) for 20 minutes, this was ample amount of time to take in the vast amount of landscape around you and for your instructor to do some tricks.

Getting to the parapenting site is another small cost, if you are staying in Medellin you can normally get a taxi up there and back for around 30,000 COP per hour (getting the taxi driver to stay is a good idea, there might not be as many taxis up at the site).

My pictures really don´t do this area justice, it was spectacular.