For a colonial force that ran around robbing, raping and killing a continent for over 300 years, you have to say the Spanish were pretty shitty explorers. I mean, OK, the jungles of South America could absorb all of Europe, but the amount of stuff they didn't find during their rule is quite incredible. Famously, Macchu Picchu went under the radar until almost exactly 100 years ago when an American went to the trouble of bribing a local school boy for its location. Hardly needed Indiana Jones, did it?
It's taken three and a half days of walking to get here and it's rarely been easy, though it's been a walk in the national park compared to the toil of the bastards who first rediscovered it in 1973. The nameless men spent weeks in the jungle, fighting off clouds of mosquitoes and poisonous snakes, and eventually discovered one of South America's most important archaeological sites. 
Twenty-five years since it's “official” rediscovery, the Lost City receives hundreds of visitors a month which, as my legs quiver beneath me on the first day, seems like an awful lot of masochists. Half an hour after leaving humanity behind, having crossed a river twice, we are half an hour into our first big ascent.
The second day starts with another enormous hill, and legions of army ants that bumble across the muddy path with neatly-cut leaves, like wind-surfers struggling with little green sails. Thankfully, they're not the only distraction from the pain. Unlike in many of the world's other wild places, here the jungle theme music is almost exclusively pleasurable. Some are tuneful, some are comical, and one tumbling-then-crashing cry sounds uncannily like an 8-bit computer sprite losing its life.
It's not until the close of our third day of hiking, as we find our spartan accommodation just on the outskirts of the Lost City, that I get a chance to sit down to talk with Rey properly.
To his amazement, he got there to find that his fellow guide and five hostages had been deemed politically unimportant enough to be released. Having taken the direct route back to town, they had already raised the alarm.
The number of people trekking to the Ciudad Perdida is increasing every year, partly because of the post-kidnapping security shake-up that took place along the route, and partly because there is an increasing feeling that places like the phenomenally busy Machu Pichu have evolved into some kind of shite Incan Disney Land.
The Peruvian site is the most famous blackspot in Spanish discovery, but it's not the only thing that escaped their. Off the top of my head, there's the Nazca Lines, also in Peru, and, beneath the bottom of my aching feet, there's the Ciudad Perdida, the lost city of Colombia.
Unfortunately, they then immediately set about ruining their chance of greatness by stealing everything of value. Indeed, they didn't stop until almost three years later when news of the find filtered back to the real world. Fortune? Maybe. Glory? Definitely not.
Tours have been taking place since 1994, but the route has changed little since the early days: the ruins can only reached via a five-day hike over 50km of testing jungle terrain. The ferocity of the mosquitoes remains as undiminished today as it was when the ruins were built by the pre-Colombian Tairona civilisation some 1200 years ago.
To combat the insects, we are doused in Repel 100, a diabolically powerful repellent that claims to be made from 98.11% DEET. The others in my group marvel at its toxicity: the brand seems to be only available in America – and is likely illegal in several states there. It often feels like using nuclear waste as sunscreen, such is the burning sensation on our skin.
Now we're trekking uphill, out above the canopy, this heat is joined by humidity. I can feel every vein in my body bouncing to the same rhythm, I know my face is glowing crimson – this, I presume, is what it's like to die in a microwave.
After an hour of climbing, we stop at a clearing to listen to our guide, Edwin Rey, talk about how this area inside the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park is changing. Just a few years ago, this vista would have looked over a sea of coca plants (until recently, you could even go on a tour of a cocaine laboratory Рjournalists fucked it for everyone by running an expos̩... Fucking journalists) but then hardcore killer President Uribe implemented a plan to pay the farmers a subsidy to grow something else. Don't let any of this kid you, though. Just because America throws fruitless millions to prevent it and a few alleged baddies get shot, Colombia is still the world capital of the white stuff and every town along the northern coast may as well be fucking ski resorts.
We clamber over the nameless summit, skirt across a plateau, then plunge back into the jungle, taking hourly breaks for fresh fruit and water. As on the first day, we reach our destination after just four hours of very intense, impossibly sweaty walking. Literally every stitch we wear is soaked and with the permanent humidity of the jungle, nothing will truly dry until we are back in Santa Marta, our starting point.
As the region's most experienced Lost City guide, Rey leads our group as a merciless pacesetter who is only joined by dedicated hikers and speed merchants, an international group that often includes everyone except us.
His surname translates as King, but that's about Edwin's only regal attribute. He talks a lot with his hands, and with sound effects, to cut down on the amount of translation required. Despite the language barrier, I like him immediately. The fact that he is happy to criticise the awfulness of Israeli backpackers (he says you can spot the women because they are fat and the men because they're muscular and high) helps too.
Edwin has officially been coming to the Lost City since Turcol Tours pioneered hikes here in the mid-1990s, but his connection to the place goes back way beyond that. His father was with the original anthropological and archaeological groups who studied the place and, Rey volunteers, was probably here before anything “official” was going on at all.
Rey junior (Prince?) was working as a financial controller for a construction company in Santa Marta until Turcol opened their route. He then immediately changed careers to literally follow in his father's footsteps. Other than fairly normal perils of the journey (fucking idiot Israelis high on coke and hash falling into ravines, snakes, fucking idiot Israelis erroneously thinking that eating wild mushrooms will always result in magic etc.) everything went smoothly until 2003.
Ostensibly, Edwin Rey's involvement with the infamous kidnapping of 15 people from within the grounds of the Lost City was the briefest of everyone. Back then, groups spent at least one night sleeping in huts inside the ruins. On this particular day eight years ago, an armed group of guerillas approached the trekkers, escorting them away under the pretence that there had been killings nearby; the group needed come with them if they want to live.
The ruse didn't last long: soon Rey was tied-up, taken away from the rest and locked in a hut. Alone in the dark, he quickly reached the conclusion that if he hung around, he would be dead. A poor local guide is not worth much political currency.
So this being real life, and Edwin not being fucking Rambo, he did the only logical thing he could – he freed himself, scrambled out of the hut and ran for his life. He spent the following three days in the jungle believing the kidnappers to be hot on his tail, and followed a circuitous alternative route back to Santa Marta to throw them off the scent. On the first day he survived by drinking from rivers and eating wild bananas and guavas. That night, unsure of where their loyalties may lie, he tentatively approached an indigenous house with the story that he was looking for a lost tourist. They gave him shelter, as did another house on the second night. By the end of the third day, he limped into Santa Marta to tell the police what had taken place.
Any relief Rey felt at their safe return was quickly extinguished when he was handed over to the notoriously brutal paramilitaries for questioning. How was it he had escaped alone? Why hadn't he hung around? Why didn't he have any tourists with him?
The eye of suspicion weighed heavy on the married father of one, so much so that after 45 days of retirement (the other guide never returned to work), Rey found himself back in the jungle to appease the investigators. Not that this gave him any comfort: the guerillas were still in the hills somewhere with eight hostages. They knew Edwin's face and, thanks to local newspaper reports, his name too.
Eight years later, arseholes like me still ask him to tell the story so many times, he couldn't forget it even if he wanted it to. And I get the impression he really wishes he could.
Now we're sitting in the Lost City proper a man with a machete has just walked past our hut. He didn't answer Rey's first four or five calls to get his attention, which clearly didn't sit well with our jug-eared host. Sitting bolt upright, trying to get a better look, on the brink of panic, Edwin was a vision of discomfort until the man offered a casual “hola”.
Mark Henderson, a British hostage who was one of the final five released by the guerillas (all were done so without being harmed) recently made a feature-length documentary about his experience. Rey refused to take part in the making of My Kidnapper and when the production team offered to send him a DVD of the final edit anyway, he refused that too. Even for a king of this jungle, some traumas evidently run deep.
But as it stands, the numbers will always be limited because it's such a bastard to get here. Even from the gates of the city, you have to scramble up a flight of 1,200 mossy, slippery stairs. Before starting we heard one story of a couple of fat South African ladies who literally collapsed at the top and demanded the military helicopter take them back. It took them two days of being told “no” to get off their arses again.
And is it worth it? Well it's certainly a lot less touristy than Machu Piccu. One of the Mountain Battalion soldiers sells a couple of drinks from a cooler almost-apologetically, but other than him and a few camouflaged comrades in the background, we are the only people here to explored the ruins. Sticking it's balding head out just above the trees, Ciudad Perdida looks like something halfway between the mountainous settlement of Maccu Picchu and the jungle-fodder of Angkor Wat, but in truth it's not as spectacular as either. And the final twist of the knife is that the first three days of walking are then crammed into just one and a half on the home stretch, turning death by microwave into death by boiling.
But when you're home all the tragedy and self-loathing and thoughts of death subside - and then you see it...