Unkidnapped

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Back last night from the Lost City. What a place! Shall I compare it to Macchu Picchu? Well, it´s smaller (or, at least, a lot less exposed) and a lot less maintained, and your group are literally the only people there (whereas in MP about half the world is soaking up the atmotsphere alongside you). The setting is great (as it was at MP) with lush mountainsides, waterfalls, low-lying clouds and the sound of monkeys and birds in the jungle.



The site is a series of circular terraces which were the bases of houses belonging to the Tayrona Indians. It was built around 1000 years ago and discovered by looters in 1975 (so there aren´t many small finds left). Anyway, go and google it - Colombia´s "Ciudad Perdida".

I didn´t meditate or put my hands against the walls to feel special sensations in the palms of my hands like the Australian couple did (wierdos: they didn´t even talk about sport), but I did smile a lot and get excited running around taking photos.

The trek itself was good also and also different from the Inca Trail. Firstly different because of the heat. Phew, it got hot. Sometimes, however, there was a river to swim in and cool down, which was great. At one camp, there was a natural pool with a waterfall going into it where you could jump in and this was just perfect.

The landscape was very different from the IT too, as normally we were hiking through dense forest on rough trails (whereas the Inca Trail is quite open and frequently paved). There´s a lot of water around because it rains a lot. Heavy rain plus eight river crossings on day 4 equalled permanently wet feet and red raw blisters for me.

The group were great (even the Australians, who can´t help it after all if they have a special connection to Mother Nature which allows them to give energy back to the Earth viw collective consciousness. They´ll tell you about it some time, at length.) and it was a giggle. I haven´t laughed so hard for a long time as when it took me three attempts to get into my hammock on the final night. The first time, I tried to wrap the blanket round me first, and got hopelessly entangled with the hammock and mosquito net. The second time, I tried to keep it simple, and launched myself in, but came straight out the other side and landed head-first on the dirt floor.

So we went untouched by the guerillas (and our guide Walter assured us that all the ununiformed young men with large guns we saw near the start at intervals were military and not paramilitary) but the biting insects more that made up for it. Right, listen, I wore trousers the Entire time despite the heat and yet still my legs are a state. They were biting through layers of clothing! They even got through the mossie net and my hammock and trousers to bite my bottom overnight, which I think is really taking the biscuit.

We also saw quite a lot of native Indians and had a look in some of their huts. The shaman let us take a picture of him with his family. As a trained anthropologist, I thought in hindsight I should probably have been saying things like, "Could you explain your kinship system?" and "Would you tell me some of the binomial oppositions you have present in your cultural conception of the world and how these come into play in your rituals of rites of passage?", but all I could think of at the time was, "Why are you so short?". (I didn´t actually say that, of course, not wanting to get a machete through the head.)

Back in Santa Marta, I was going to go to a little fishing village called Taganga today, but I´ve been scuppered by a huge storm which has turned the streets to rivers, so maybe I´ll try and go quickly tomorrow morning before taking my first of four flights in five days. I´m beginning to get my hopes up that the camera will crash to Earth or sea still in my possession (and there´s even an outside chance we´ll both of us land safely at Heathrow on Thursday morning).

You can buy a small bucketfull - literally a bucket, the small kind kids have on the beach - of juice here for 50p, so I´m going to pass the rest of the day doing that and then nip to Taganga first thing tomorrow morning to have red snapper for brunch before flight no.1 to Bogota.

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