Each day so far we’ve hiked about four hours, which doesn’t sound like that far, but this is the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done. The terrain is never flat. We are always hiking straight up or straight down, through mud, across rivers, or picking our way through boulder fields. A couple of mules clop along behind us, our supplies and cases of food roped to their backs (we carry our own backpacks), and a couple of skinny boys follow them with sticks, yelling sharply and giving them an occasional whack in the butt to keep them moving. We are spread out on the trail. Hugo, who must be most of seven feet tall, leaps mountains and rivers and tall trees in a single bound. He covers in two hours what the rest of us cover in four, never having to climb over anything because his legs are so long. Pedro and Arelis follow. They modestly say they’re out of shape, but speed along anyway in their high-tech hiking gear. Laura and I are after them, and after us come Paola and Santiago, the brother and sister from Bogotá. Santiago has some sort of slight mental disability. He brought a shoulder bag rather than a backpack, and always wears his headphones. He laughs at things we can’t see, but seems happy enough. Paola is sweet and patient with her brother, a bit frumpy in her visor and high-waisted shorts. It takes them four times as long to finish a section of trail as it takes Hugo, but I have to give her props. She told us that she thought it was a walk, not an epic trek, and she and Santiago finish every bit that the rest of us do and never complain.
We fight our way up endless steep hills. The red dirt trail twists enough that I can only ever see about fifty feet ahead of me before it turns again. I gather my resolve at each turn, telling myself that after this section of trail there will be a stretch of blessed downhill. Of course, there hardly ever is, and we climb up and up and up. Sometimes the trees clear and I catch a glimpse of what we’ve covered--green foggy rolling mountains as far as the eye can see. These vistas bring a welcome breath of moving air as well. I rest for a minute and hold my shirt away from my stomach, trying to let it in. The descents are impressive as well, as steep as the uphill stretches. Yesterday it rained on us, and the soft red clay turned into a sea of slippery mud. Ben had a walking stick, the use of which I quickly took over. We slipped and skidded down the uneven hills, feet sinking into muck, and thanks to some strange miracle I didn’t fall. When I got tired I’d get visions of Jillian Michaels, the trainer from the Biggest Loser, in my head as I climbed. “Come on! Faster? You gonna cry?” she’d shout, and I’d picture her fat victim struggling to finish that half-hour on the treadmill or eke out another bicep curl. I could identify with them, worn out and pouring with sweat, climbing the hills. I liked the feeling of such hard work, though, and triumph comes with the summit of each peak. The trail is spectacularly beautiful--incredible enough to make up for the physical effort ten times over. We hike along through baroque greenery, vines, and layers and layers of plants all growing on top of each other, on top of enormous tree trunks that seem to be a thousand years old. All around us are the calls of wild birds and the sound of water rushing over rocks. The whole thing is alive. Going through it I keep thinking about the beginning of 100 Years of Solitude, when the town of Macondo is founded beside a river whose banks are full of huge prehistoric stones. The world in the story is so new that lots of things haven’t been named yet, and that’s the way this is. I think the whole world must have been that way in the beginning, fresh and new and vibrant and green, smelling of fertile dirt and buzzing with bugs.
Eventually we got to the first campsite, which was was a covered bunch of hammocks next to a campfire and a couple of picnic tables. At the base of a waterfall in the river nearby was a pool big enough to swim in. So far, I haven’t encountered anything on this earth quite like swimming in a rainforest pool. I felt the mist from the plunging water on my feet first, and then up my legs as I climbed down the rope ladder. When I got near the bottom I pushed off the rock wall with my hands and feet, feeling myself suspended in the air for just a second before hitting the surface. I was still hot from the hike and all at once I felt my skin tighten at the sudden coolness, the only sound in my ears the muffled roar of the waterfall. Laura and Hugo and I floated around for a while. I swam to the warmer, shallower water near the algae-slimy rock walls and fought my way against the churning water to get as close as I could to the waterfall.
When we got back Omar and Luis cooked us great piles of rice and beans. I put away more food than I ever have before. Ben got sick with food poisoning last night. I saw him stretched out, green and miserable, on a picnic-table bench, and this morning he went back to Santa Marta on a mule. Poor guy.
Early this morning a man in an orange shirt with a leather knife holder hanging from his belt came to our camp. He introduced himself as Juan and told us that he could give us a tour of a nearby, cocaine laboratory. Nonfunctional, he told us, but quickly added that we would not be allowed to photograph his face, though we could take pictures of any of the other apparatus. I accepted, not being one to turn down a tour of a former drug factory. Laura and Hugo came too. The Colombians were, I’m sure, sick of hearing about cocaine, so stayed at the campsite. We curious ones hiked up the hillside a few minutes, following Juan through narrow openings in the leaves, jumping across trickles of water and feeling invisible, tacky spiderwebs stick to our faces. We came into a circular area where the plants were cleared out but the thick canopy remained (it was then I realized why it’s useless to look for these things by flying over in planes). A tarp stretched between a couple of spindly poles kept the whole operation dry. Juan told us that fifteen years ago these mountains had been one big coca-growing region. Farmers, including Juan’s family, could make twice the money for half the work growing coca than growing coffee, so during the ‘80s everybody cultivated it. Juan had been assigned to remove the leaves when he was young, one of the less-dangerous jobs. He showed us how they crush up the leaves with salt and something that looked like plaster dust (to this day it’s illegal, by the way, to buy salt in large quantities in Colombia). They mix all that in a big drum with gasoline, and from there the chemical list got scarier and scarier. Drano, sulfuric acid, iodine, acetone. Yikes. Eventually he showed us the product of what seemed like a whole roomful of coca leaves: about a tablespoon of innocuous-looking white paste.
Juan told us that the coastal region had all converted to the cultivation of coffee and bananas, thanks to subsidies that made the crops worth growing. He knew of some families who chose to keep growing coca, but they had to move to the jungle area closer to the borders of Brazil and Peru. “They can’t ever relax,” he told us. “The paramilitaries and the FARC have to protect them, and they know the government is looking for them. They live with a lot of danger all the time.”
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