Last Wednesday we packed our suitcases and ourselves into a Volkswagen and headed from Chachapoyas to La Jalca. A half hour later the pavement disappeared. We rattled down the road alongside the Utcumamba River for an hour before the driver stopped.
He pointed to one of the green cliffs towering above the river. On cliff face vegetation obscured stone fortifications. Pre-Incan the driver said.
How old? A thousand years? The driver smiled. “Much older,” he replied.
The driver stopped the car a few miles further in front of a stone laid near the road. Someone had carved a puma into the rock centuries ago.
An hour-and-a-half into the journey, our driver turned into the dirt path that led to La Jalca. It’s a half hour of switchbacks in a car or grueling hour-and-half 2,200 feet up the mountainside.
A rusted sign points to a dirt path, which leads to the lost city of Ollape - built by the same people who carved the puma and laid the stone along the cliff faces. Our driver headed straight and dropped us of off at our new home for the next two years.
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