Blood sugar trek magic.

If you notice them at all, first you notice the leaves. Tiny green confetti conveyoring across the jungle floor, crossing the narrow ambiguous path that leads me to and from the terraced ruins of the lost city. It's the surrealism that grabs your attention, the leaves marching along on their own, at a stutter pace like frames are missing from the projection, until you bend carefully down to see the cluster swirl of fire ants, little burning clouds along the ground as they transport the leaves seemingly without end. An internal existence of motion and burden that appears charmingly impossible when viewed from the outside.  

Even though I knew it was a projected construct of my own, just the harmonious nuance of nature when viewed in detail, I couldn't bring myself to step on them, again and again and again. Actively avoiding what to most others would be a total afterthought. And so they became another reason for constant awareness. The unending vigilance that is the trek to and from Ciudad Perdida, the Eighth Century lost city in Colombia's Sierra Nevada mountains that I wanted to be my first experience on the South American continent. Something primal that few areas on earth could offer and a chance to experience a continent chronologically. To examine its roots before exploring the myriad paths they've stretched. 

In addition to stepping over the ants I was stepping carefully around muleshit, horseshit, through caked clay mud that hasn't solidified for over two months during the constant downpour in the rainy season that just ended. This while stepping on rocks slick with streamwater and destabilized from the steps of other hikers. But for the first three days, these were afterthoughts. Far more of my focus was on the impossible vistas, the mountains upon mountains and falling curtains of tree tops in the distance. And also on the spaces far closer to me, the overhangs of kudzu vines strung like permanent lightning above our frequent swimming spots. The god'stature leaves the size of canoes dwarfing us further. Reaffirming our existence as transitory in comparison to the unbroken eras of barely'touched life we plunge through. It wasn't until late on the first day that difficulties arrived with the fabled afternoon rains and rather than firm steps we slide through an orange muck, fellow hikers around me falling constantly. My footing miraculously holds, at least on that first day, even though I'm taking leaping strides and windmilling arms for balance, drawing some wry looks from another of the American trekkers.

"Sorry.... I'm having far more fun than I should be."

We reach our first camp by the last few minutes of daylight and spend the dark hours with cold cans of cerveza Aguila, colder showers, and tightly-packed hammocks that rock uncontrollably in the freezing night. We wake before the sunlight does and set off only as it's beginning to reveal the land around us. In our views of that second morning, dozens of pockets of sunken clouds lay attached to the earth, like dew on a grandiose scale, and their reluctant release takes most of the day before it finally occurs. This ten mile leg includes the most vertical stretch of the path and coincides with the most intense heat of the entire four day journey. The tangerines we stop for raise our blood sugar enough to keep us fueled, the dusty powder leaving the orange flesh as it's peeled just as reluctantly as the morning clouds. It's on the second day that we see the first of the indigenous peoples, beginning with a cherubic set of children in rough ponchos. We're told by our guide Nicolas that our presence as tourists is viewed by them as a necessary evil. While part of our fee for the hike goes towards government programs for their health care, we're bringing our modernized ways to a place still sacred to them. Deciding what Instagram filter best suits the site where eighty of their shaman are currently gathered in prayer and discussion. We see a cluster of their straw huts, an infrequently used village occupied during various ceremonies they hold. While the Irish and American girls try to coax the java'eyed children into photographs, I'm distracted by the coca shrub Nicolas has pointed out, growing conveniently on the fringes of the ceremonial huts. Because while technology and culture divides us irreparably, narcosis bridges, as it always does. And as I slowly chew a small handful of the leaves, that familiar numbness warms the bottom of my face and for the next several minutes, the greens and blues around us race to my eyes more sharply. 

The next I see of the indigenous is in the afternoon, a group of three women with their hands clasped in either prayer or revulsion as they stare shock'faced at the blood pouring down my shin. Whatever luck I had earlier in the mud I used up because when I finally do fall late in the second day it's from my poor footing on a narrow ridge of rocks. The speed and height of the fall, along with the weight of my backpack, allows me to turn a full revolution sideways in midair, before my left knee cracks audibly on another line of rocks, leaving a rapidly swelling bump and six scratches along my leg. When we reach the second camp about 90 minutes later and I clean the wound I see that one is particularly deep, an instant scar. Enough so that if I were back in New York or even the coastal city of Santa Marta, I'd go in for stitches. But since I'm a 2-day trip into the jungle removed from anything close to a triage, I rely on borrowed antiseptic and naked hope to avoid infection. So along with the mud of the too'troden path, the loads of shit from the pack animals that make the same trek as us to carry food, the omnipresent mosquitos (one girl in our group finished the trek with 80-some bites) and my constant lines of ants, the second half of the trek has the added burden of a limping knee. To those, toes that hammer in with every step as we walk back down, stopping my weighted momentum in every footstep. Add ankles that turn constantly after they've turned just once, as they swell to the size of my calves, purple and yellow with more blood pooling beneath the surface of my skin.

Our four day path is far more arduous than my cocky self-assuredness was anticipating. Given its remote location and the effort involved in reaching it, my surprise isn't in that Ciudad Perdida lay hidden until 1971; it's that it was discovered again at all. It was grave-robbers fueled by legends of buried gold that found it, three centuries after it was abandoned and some one-thousand three hundred-years after it was initially settled. Our group once again recrossed a river to reach it, this time up to most people's waists, before ascending nearly two-thousand stone steps to the terraces of green'furred stones. The site itself is fascinating, if simple. This is not Angkor, nor Machu Picchu. The terrace stone foundations are all that remain, the straw and mud huts that sat upon them eaten long ago by time. A military encampment with twenty or so soldiers overlooks the site. And while the uniformed teenagers and with their massive rifles do not want to be photographed, a few of of them eagerly take ours when asked politely. After our descent and recrossing the river yet again, beginning our boomerang path back the way we came, the first thing I encounter is a butterfly swarm. A dozen tornado'round in front of me, like García Marquez's Mauricio Babilonia is walking among us. The Colombian jungle foreshadowing the next journey to follow my current one.

What the butterflies failed to signal was the difficulties ahead. To the list of physical burdens is the mental one that comes with the idea of retreat and covering retrodden ground. Of staring down at my feet for footing in descent rather than the stunning panoramas enveloping us. Add to it as well the burden of guilt we feel when passing our last set of indigenous people. A boy and girl, both younger than eight, they stand in one of the few flatlands of the journey. They boy looks at me sternly. I haven't seen my reflection in 4 days, so I'm not sure what it is he sees, if anything beyond my white skin. As I near he barks "Dulce?" in the tone of interrogation. He remains silently unimpressed after my reply of "No tengo." We all stop just 2 minutes later for more tangerines and small bananas and breathlessly an exhausted voice addresses the group.

"Did any of you give that boy candy?" It's the Irish girl, the one who eagerly coaxed the ponchoed toddler into a few photographs in her first encounter with a native. "I gave him my Oreos and he just stared at me. He wouldn't say thank you; he didn't even smile at all." I stay silent as well, thinking tiredly of the narrow line between touch and contamination. Of how Nicolas also said there are some tribes in these mountains that have never been contacted by the modern world. Their only external interaction is with a very small number of the shaman of the other indigenous tribes, and even then on extremely rare occasions. I finish my banana half and wonder which of the two interactions will resonate with the Irish girl longer.

After the pause to further refuel, we take up our backpacks again and continue the wending path down the mountains. As usual, I hang toward the back of the bunch, not out of lacking physical ability but my recurrent casual meditation. Savoring the last few painful kilometers of my first excursion in South America, in the form of photographs taken and views appreciated as I breathe slowly. We bunch back up towards the end and again my eyes look down to find the proper footing, seeing another swirl of the interminable population of ants, their leaves turning sharply like green kabuki fans. In their lifetime they'll only meet an infinitesimal fraction of those with whom they share a fate. From the others they are geographically unconnected but burdened by the same instinct. They live, doing what comes naturally to them, one of the only activities they know how to do properly. All throughout the jungle floor of the Sierra Nevadas, the ants march along, their weighted burdens poised above them, as the line of trekkers walks above them carrying their hiking packs through the mountain path.