(continued...) Arrived at the lost city, La Ciudad Perdida, via stone steps climbing straight out of the river - hundreds of steps up to the terraces of the city. La Ciudad Perdida was the holy city of the Tyrona people. It was built in the 800s AD and was in existence until the arrival of the conquistadors in the 1500s. The conquistators actually never made it to La Ciudad Perdida, but they conquered the Tyrona people who were living at the coast and, by way of infectious disease, managed to spread their foreign germs to the Tyrona people futher in 
the jungle and wipe them out. The jungle took over the city and was only discovered in the 1970s. 3 days from the nearest non-indiginous village it certainly is remote. There are 50 military stationed there, who seemed to be having a grand time. Actually they really were excited to see people. This one guy ran up to me while I was walking ahead to take some pictures. I was sure I had done something wrong and was going to get yelled at. No, he just wanted to chat me up! Sarah, Brooke, Muz and I had fun with our military photo session, as you can see. 
Spent the night at the lost city and then started our trek back down. Here is us at the end... whew.
So, I said I´d get back to the Kogui people. They are the indiginous people living near the lost city and claim to be the direct descendents of the Tyrona. We kept interacting with them both on the trail and in our camps - the trail intersected their village and homes. Until La Ciudad Perdida became a tourist destination they had little interaction with the non-indiginous community. To this day the Kogui people who live above La Ciudad Perdida do not speak any Spanish and have not interacted with the ´outside world¨. I only have a picture of Kogui from afar. I really felt self-conscious taking photos of them up close. They seemed so shy and cautious around us, that's for sure. Our guide, Beto, filled us in on the lives of the Kogui. Well, it is a hard life, for the women anyway. As soon as they have their first period, they get married and start having children. They have one baby every year after that until - they have a birth complication, or a child with problems, or they can no longer get pregnant. They also grow and harvest all the crops, prepare meals and care for all of their children. The children, by the way, start having to pull their weight pretty early on. We came across 2 children - one about 4 or 5 who was minding his 2-ish year old sibling - just cruising around the jungle by themselves. By 40 the women are old, old. The men have it pretty easy by comparison. They take care of chopping down the big trees and, as far as we could tell, spend most of the day twirling their poporos, gourds with little sticks mashing the coca leaves up with snail shell which extracts the coca. We learned about 3 ´sacrifices´ which the Kogui still perform. The first is that if a child is born with a deformity or medical problem, they are suffocated by the chief. The second is that if twins are born, the weaker of the twins is also suffocated (the theme here is that the woman are pretty busy with their annual newborn, the rest of the children and all the other work they have to do, they certainly can't have 2 babies at once or a baby with problems!) And the last sacrifice is that when they get too old to travel to the village (crossing the river, etc, etc) they are given the ´special tea´ - which kills them. For the women this means late 40s, early 50s! The men seem to live a lot longer, or at least Beto told us about a chief who was 90 and had a new 15 year old wife. Oh yeah, once a woman can't have children anymore the husband can take a new wife, of course. Well I, for one, am pretty glad I wasn't born a Kogui woman!
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