who knew they had crabs in the jungle?

i've just returned from my trek to the lost city or 'Ciudad Perdida' as its called in spanish; back to civilisation after 6 days in the jungle and 5 nights of sleeping in a hammock. The first day began very early when our guide knocked on my room door at 6am! (-slightly earlier than expected and so i made my first error and forgot to pack my Bikini which had been drying from the previous day). On arriving in the next town i met the rest of our group, i knew it was going to be small because the world cup final was being played later on in the afternoon and just about everyone i had met wanted to stay in town to watch that; but the couple i met in the hotel lobby were a 64year old austrailian couple, not exactly who i'd imagined spending the next 6 days with! But as it turns out there was one more member of our group, Johanna a swedish girl and she too hadn't expected our guide to turn up so early and had slept right through his knocking! she turned up about half an hour later looking a little worse for wear and then spent the initial bus journey fast asleep trying to get rid of her hangover much to the shock of our older companions. Before we reached the small town from which we would start our walk the bus had broken down twice, the final time the driver removed a rather large cable from under the bonnet and then hit the engine with a hammer before it started again (!?) and picked up various people along the way, including a hitchhiker going our way and the guide's 2 sons who would also be acompanying us on the trek too. The hike finally began several hours later than planned and started off quite easily walking out of the town along a shady path beside a gurgling river, stopping to have lunch and swim in the river (in my underwear as i had forgotten my bikini) "not too bad", i thought, "i hope the whole thing will be like this" - wrong! about 30 minutes after lunch we reached the bottom of a large steep hill and started to ascend, after about 40minutes of this i did think maybe i was going to die- never in my life have i ever been so sweaty! not after the gym or even the hottest nightclub ever, it was fairly gross; and everytime i looked up there was more steep hill above me, in fact i was suspecting this was actually a mountain! we continued to walk upwards for about 2hours afterwhich my legs didn't feel like they still belonged to me! finally at the top we walked for a few more hours until we reached our destination for the night( the hut in the picture above). There was no electricity and so after it got dark ther wasn't much to do, which was just as well really as we were all very tired and so fell to sleep in our hammocks strung up on the veranda.
The following morning we awoke around dawn to the sound of the cockerel crowing on the ground beneath our hammocks and i discovered that my legs are obviously faviourite food for the mosquitos. We were on the road fairly early, a blessing as by 8am the sun was already very hot and again i was dripping wet, um attractive! The scenery was beautiful, no roads to be seen at all, just mountains covered in jungle and the occasional small farm, the owners of which, our guide told us, had to walk the way we had already come just to get to the nearest town! We arrived at our destination for the day fairly early and so could spend the rest of the afternoon swimming in the river just beneath our camp, lovely and relaxing day. Which should perphaps of warned me that following day maybe a little difficult...
It was! We got early and left immediately after breakfast and walked straight down to the river, that we had to cross and then up a mountain and down the other side, pausing briefly to sample to bananas, avocado and pineapple that were growing on the trees beside us and pass through a tiny village made of small circular huts belonging to the indigenous people of the area. The people are tiny, we met a woman who could not have been taller than 4'2, had 5 children with another on the way and didn't know how old she was! We reached the river again after a few hours only to find out we had to cross it again, and again and again- in fact we had to cross it another 8 times! Its rainy season in the jungle at present andalthough we had been lucky not not got rained on as we walked, there had been rain in the evenings and night time as a result the river was higher (and faster) than usual, so much stornger that our guide had at some points to carry his 10yr old son across so that he didn't get washed away. After crossing the river for the final time we reached the entrance to Ciudad Perdida, well actually what we had reached was the bottom of an impossibly long flight of narrow moss covered steps that we had to climb; Going up these steps, although very punishing on my leg muscles was nothing like the terror i felt when we had to descend these slippery stairs a few days later. At the top we encountered our first set of ruins, these were circular platforms on which small circular houses had once been built. The entire site was almost overtaken by the jungle so there were vines hanging down, tropical leafy trees and hundreds of tiny pink and orange flowers everywhere we looked, growing right up to the orderly placed, but now slighty green stones of the city; giving the whole place an air of mystery if not an enchanted quality.
We spent 2 days at the ruins before we had to leave and begin our perilous return to the river. The following morning we had a tour of all the ruins; as the city was only rediscovered 25yrs ago not much is known about the way in which the people lived or what really caused the demise of their civilisation and so i was left with many unanswered questions even after we had explored the ruins extensively. Our accomodation whilst at the ruins was a wooden hut where we slept beneath mosquito nets on little roll mats and washed in the waterfall that ran down the mountain side, comfortable enough but rather cold at night- to the point where Johanna and i shared a 'bed' just to keep warm. And the mosquitos... have you ever seen a swarm of them!? by the end of our 2 days there Onix, our guide's youngest son, had 452 bites on his body!
The walk back should, you might think be easier and indeed it may be if we hadn't have to do it in 2 days instead of the 3 it took to walk there. After leaving the city we walked all the way back to the place we stayed on the first night, a full 8 hours of difficult walking and again many crossings of the river. We had seen no wildlife on the journey out and so much to my suprise as i was scrambling over a rock, several miles from the river and large bright red crab tried to bite me! i'm not sure who was more shocked me or the rest of our group as i let out a loud scream, don't worry i left the experience unharmed. After that we did see several more crabs, but rather disappointingly no monkeys or jaguars.
Our final day was only 3 easy hours of walking, most of this downhill and so i was expecting to be back at my hostel around lunchtime but... when we reached the town we had started from we were told that no bus was coming from the tour agency and we simply had to wait for a vehicule travelling in our direction, needless to say it was much much after lunch time when we finally reached civilisation very tired indeed and in desperate need of a good shower.