Rising sharply out of Colombia’s Caribbean shoreline, the 3 000m Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the highest coastal mountain formation in the world. Its exquisitely beautiful slopes, covered in dense cloud forest, are home to an ancient cosmology — as well as being a wellspring for the world’s most notorious narcotics trade. Adventurous tourists can explore both.
The Sierra Nevada’s high slopes are where you will find the Ciudad Perdida, a 1 000-year-old city built by the pre-Colombian culture of the Tyrona Indians who inhabited the mountain and its coastal lowlands. After the arrival of the Spanish Conquistas in the 1500s, the city was swallowed by cloud forest for 500 years before being “rediscovered” in the early 1970s by bands of grave robbers who had over many years followed up on rumours of ancient treasures in the mountains.
The thieves were followed by teams of archaeologists who suspected the bandits had found an ancient cemetery. It turned out, in fact, that it was the site of an entire City of the Tyrona civilisation that lasted from 500AD through its height of splendour in 1000 to the 1600s — the century in which the Conquistas pillaged the gold of the Tyronas while murdering and enslaving the people. The Spaniards never reached the Tyrona city but their savagery led to its abandonment.
While ancient ruins in countries such as Peru and Mexico are easily accessible, visitors to the Ciudad Perdida have to take a six-day hike through high mountains and thick forest. The tours are offered by Tucol, a company in Santa Marta, a town in the foothills of the mountains. Tucol provides two guides, a cook and a mule to help carry the provisions. And, in a concession to the protests of the Indians who want to avoid the desecration of their sacred site, Tucol limits your stay in the ancient city to a maximum of two nights.
The lower slopes, traversed for the first half of the hike, are occupied by campensinos (farmers) who have left massive scars of cleared forest that have been cultivated for a few years and then left to weed. But the trip becomes more magical the higher up you go. The upper slopes, inhabited by Kogi Indians who are descendants of the Tyronas, have been declared an indigenous reserve.
The transition is dramatic. Entering the area tended by the Kogis takes you from devastated slopes into the heart of a protected forest where every plant and animal is considered sacred. The Kogis live according to a complex code of rules that ensures that they are in equilibrium with both plant and animal cycles and astral movements. This code, or Law of the Mother, has informed their agronomic calendar and the distribution of their crops, allowing them to remain self sufficient over the centuries with little negative impact on their land.
Late on day three you arrive at the more-than-a-thousand slippery stone stairs built by the Tyronas that take you into the heart of the Ciudad Perdida. The stairs, built to facilitate drainage directly into the river, are enveloped in a cathedral-like canopy of glistening moss, dripping ferns and vibrant orchids. Towering trees join hands to create a cocoon of quietness … disturbed only by armies of the world’s fiercest mosquitoes.
The site was both the spiritual and political seat of the Tyronas. The linkage between the sacred and secular is reflected in the misty translucent light that bathes the first stone circle you reach. From the height of the ruins you can see thick mantles of forest that cover gentle slopes rising high into the clouds on each horizon.
Many of the larger structures in the city were temples, places of prayer and meeting places for the shamans, the religious and political leaders of the surrounding communities. While little is known of its inhabitants, what remains demonstrates a great understanding of engineering, design and building, and a deep appreciation for workings of the forest’s rich ecological systems.
The hike comprises three rustic but comfortable camps. They have concrete floors covered by tin roofs and include both showers and toilets. Each guest is allocated a hammock and a mosquito net. The last one is the highlight, located discreetly above the ancient city and offering an easy base from which to explore its secrets.
The guides cook tasty meals before filling the nights with magical stories about the mountains and their people. Then the nets wrap you in a nest of solitude before you wake for breakfast and another day of wanderlust.
On the way to the Ciudad Perdida, we met Adan Bedoya, a neat grandfatherly man in his sixties. His kind brown face has been shaped by the same harsh elements that have chiseled these mountains for millennia.
As a migrant worker harvesting crops in Colombia and Venezuela for many years, he eventually saved enough capital to buy a small piece of land (a finca) 18 years ago, and has been growing coca and making cocaine base here ever since.
For a modest price of about R50, Bedoya agreed to show us his facility. While many cocaine factories are picked out by police helicopters and burned down, his is well hidden in dense cloud forest under a thick canopy of guardian trees. Bedoya seemed quite brazen about his work and was happy to have his picture taken and this story published.
The factory is a concrete base on the forest floor with wooden poles that hold up the roof, which is a black plastic sheet. Half of the floor is the collection area for the leaves that are left to dry. The other half is a simple processing facility. Two plastic drums, a simple cloth filter set up on a tripod of sticks, and a table and shelf housing the chemicals and tools of the trade. A thin black hosepipe supplies a continuous trickle of water diverted from a nearby stream.
The Sierra Nevada offers fertile soil and ideal conditions for the two species of coca that grow here. One is indigenous to these mountains, and has been used for hundreds of years by the Kogi Indians. The crop is central to the spiritual lives and rituals of the people, and while the leaves are harvested by the women, coca is used only be the men. Chewed in a wad mixed with the lime of shells to activate the alkaloid, it offers a mild stimulant comparable to drinking a cup of coffee — nothing like using cocaine in its pure alkaloid form.
The other variety of coca, imported from Bolivia, is used for the manufacture of cocaine. In these remote valleys, it is the ideal crop for campensinos. It is a hardy plant that shows a middle finger to drought, heat or to too much rain. The hundreds of rivers that drain the snow-peaked mountains ensure ample water for the growers.
Once the plant is mature, it can be harvested three times a year by stripping the leaves of the stems by hand. The same plant is harvested for five years. It is then cut back and grows back to supply another five years’ worth of harvest.
Bedoya’s step-by-step guide to the production of cocaine, told in broken translation, goes something like this:
l Collect the leaves of the coca plant, leave them to dry and grind them into a fine but mushy consistency.
l Prepare a mixture of salt and lime, and mix this in with the leaves (the lime is required to activate the cocaine alkaloid in the leaves).
l After an hour, this burns the leaves and turns them brown. Grind the mixture for an additional hour by stamping on it (a bit like the old-fashioned way of crushing grapes for wine).
l Place this mixture in a plastic drum and cover with petrol. The petrol strips the leaves of all its properties. Leave it for five hours and then drain the liquid out the bottom of the barrel.
l Then in another barrel, for every 12kg of leaves that was used in the petrol mixture, add one litre of water mixed with one spoon of sulphuric acid and stir. This takes the cocaine compound out of the petrol.
l The petrol rises to the top, and the water is drained through a hosepipe. The cocaine compound is now in the water mixture, and the petrol is kept to be used again.
l To the water mixture, add potassium permanganate, and then filter this mixture through a cloth.
l Add caustic soda to the water mixture that remains, and you are left with a milky liquid.
l Drain this through a cloth, and the white paste that remains is the cocaine base.
This base is made by thousands of campensinos in Colombia in small processing facilities. It is sold to the final manufacturers, who add ether in a laboratory leaving them with the final product of cocaine that is snorted up wealthy noses mostly in the United States and Europe.
About 1 000kg of coca leaves provide Bedoya with just one kilo of base to sell. For each harvest, he can make about two giving him an output of six kilos a year. Taking into account his labour, chemicals and other expenses, it costs him about R1 500 to make a kilo of base, which he sells for about R6 000. The street price of his product, which is cut and mixed with other substances before it gets there, is about R300 a gram — 1 000times more than what Bedoya gets for his work.
For him, growing and processing coca seems inordinately just in the face of a political system that allocates the lion’s share of government spend to the military, with small change being spent on development and welfare.
So despite Washington’s billion-dollar support of Plan Colombia — an ambitious project to eradicate the manufacture and sale of cocaine and other drugs from the country — the cycle of growing, manufacture and trade is so firmly established in the lives of so many like Bedoya that it is not likely to end in a hurry.
The lowdown
Your cheapest option is to fly to Bogota via Sao Paulo on Varig. Economy class tickets range from R6 800 to R7 620.
A one-way flight from Bogota to Santa Marta varies between R700 and R1 500. To get to Santa Marta, take an overnight bus from Bogota, which will cost you about R225. For security reasons, it is a good idea to get advice on which bus operator to use.
The Ciudad Perdida tour with Tucol will cost about R950.
Accommodation costs in Colombia vary, but if you are on a backpackers’ budget, you can get a good room for two people for less than R100 a night in most towns.