Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  Juvenal had invented some menial task for the boys to do, so that John and I could eat without feeling like we were onstage. With their crouched little bodies no longer blocking the view, we could watch the mules drinking from the rocky stream rolling down the hillside.

  “You never told me how you got into guiding,” I said.

  “Well, that’s sort of a long story we can get into later. I had a lot of jobs before that. I told you how I was an engineer, overseeing multimillion-dollar projects. I worked as a gardener. I was a beach inspector for seven years.”

  This sounded like the sort of job that only existed on novelty T-shirts. “What’s a beach inspector?”

  “It’s what you would call a lifeguard.” Justo set bowls of quinoa soup in front of us, along with a freshly made peppery aji sauce that was hot enough to clear our sinuses. John dumped several spoonfuls in his bowl, then passed it to me. “How’s your stomach?” he asked.

  Sniffing the aji made my mouth water and my intestines rumble. I reluctantly passed it back toward John. “Let’s just say that tomorrow might not be a great day to attend a chili cook-off,” I said.

  John blew on his spoonful of soup and reached for his pen. “What’s a chili cook-off?”

  NINETEEN

  Up, Up and Away

  Choquetacarpo Pass

  Yanama sat at almost twelve thousand feet, and most of our hiking the next day was uphill. Each time we crested a ridge, the terrain edged a few degrees further from green to brown. Streams appeared from nowhere, and we crossed them via a few logs laid above their gurgling current. We hadn’t seen rain since starting out at Cachora, and water levels were low. Most of the paths we’d followed thus far had been dusty mule trails. Today’s route was so far off the map that the Inca stonework was in near-mint condition. “Just think, Pachacutec and Manco probably came along this trail on their way from Vitcos to Choquequirao,” John said.

  Our objective for the day was to stop just short of Choquetacarpo Pass. This was one of the many fifteen-thousand-feet-high breaches in the Andes that had brought the Spaniards to their knees with soroche when they tried to pursue the Incas. The Quechua people have long known that coca helps the body adapt to the lower levels of oxygen in the thin air of the Andes. They also have biological advantages over lowlanders like me. Their hearts and lungs are larger, which is why so many Andeans have barrel chests like stevedores; they also have blood richer in red cells than a person raised at sea level. These don’t seem to be genetic adaptations, but rather physiological advantages that one earns by growing up at altitude. This made me feel a little better each time Juvenal sprinted uphill past me on a trail pitched like the roof of an A-frame.

  In midafternoon we crossed into a moonscape, a long valley with steep craggy sides capped by jagged black rocks that blocked out most of the sun’s rays. The blue-light effect was not unlike walking through the canyons of midtown Manhattan on a cloudy winter day. The ground was covered with moss and sickly scrub grass. Boulders the size of large cars and small houses were strewn about. At the far end of the gorge a blinding white glacier seemed to seal off any exit at the spot where John had said Choquetacarpo Pass would be. A shaggy wild mule wandered out of a cave, looking for food. Finding none, he disappeared into another cave. Where he’d come from originally I couldn’t begin to guess. There were no homes here, no farms, not even a rooster, just us and the rocks and Pachacutec’s trail. Two hours earlier we’d been sweating through Southern California; now we were freezing in northern Scotland.

  The only colorful spot in this landlocked fjord was our orange cook tent, dwarfed by rocks on three sides. As John and I approached, a tiny red dot also came into view—I half expected it to be the beacon of a UFO or Doctor Who’s phone booth, but it was Justo bundled up against the chill in an ancient maraschino-cherry skiwear ensemble that Jean-Claude Killy might have worn as a boy. “Look out, Señor Mark, that guy is watching you,” he said when I arrived for tea, pointing up toward a rock formation directly above us. It was shaped exactly like a giant Easter Island head.

  I woke up in the dark the next morning. It was four-thirty. Frost covered the ground under my tent.

  “Got to get going early today,” John said. Once humidity from the jungle crept up the valley—we watched a cloud of mist drift slowly toward our camp like a puff of cigar smoke—and hit Choquetacarpo Pass at mid-morning, the collision of hot and cold air could dump enough snow to cancel school in Buffalo. “I’ve seen it get ten feet deep up there,” John said. We all grabbed an extra ration of coca and were off by five-thirty.

  “I’ve got a small suggestion, Mark,” John said. “This time, chew your coca thoroughly for a few minutes and then give it another chew occasionally. It’s supposed to dissolve in your mouth.”

  Well, hey. The day before, the coca had kept soroche at bay. Today it gave me a small buzz, a slight tingling in the mouth followed by a lovely clearheadedness. Approaching fifteen thousand feet, I felt like I’d had a nap and downed a double espresso.

  “This may be the finest stretch of original Inca trail left in all Peru,” John said as we crossed a small rise, looking down onto a path that snaked ahead of us like a miniature Great Wall of China. The road was beautifully engineered. The surface was elevated and paved with white stones. Masoned retaining walls on both sides protected the causeway from flooding. In the few spots where the trail had worn through, the deep and intricate foundation work laid down five centuries ago was evident. We were walking on a work of art.

  Choquetacarpo is two miles higher than the famed Khyber Pass, taller than the Space Needle stacked on top of Mount Rainier. When it became obvious that we wouldn’t be hit by any snowstorms—there was hardly a cloud in the sky—we slackened to a strenuous stroll. Fifteen-thousand feet was almost certainly the highest I would ever stand on earth, and I wanted to savor it.

  The canyon we’d walked through was beautifully desolate, a brown badlands hemmed in by two sets of sharp, rocky incisors. The top of the pass was crowded with dozens of apachetas, towers of rocks stacked on top of each other. Nati had explained these to me once. Local people who come through a mountain pass create a new apacheta or add a stone to an old one, asking for a favor from the apus or hoping for good luck on a journey. The piles reminded me of the votive candles my mother used to light in church. John checked his watch. “Two and a half hours to the top, not bad,” he said.

  We sat down to dig into our bags of snacks. “Did Bingham ever write about the scenery?” John asked. I assured him that Bingham had referred to the green basin into which we were about to descend as “a veritable American Switzerland.”

  “That’s right! The valley down below here is beautiful. Almost perfectly intact. We’re right on the dividing line of the watershed. Everything behind us drains into the Apurimac River. Everything ahead goes into the Urubamba”—the river that winds around Machu Picchu.

  John was too excited to remain seated. He pulled an armful of gadgets out of his daypack and waded into the field of apachetas as if stepping onto a giant chessboard, taking photographs and video from all possible angles.

  “How many times have you been through here?” I asked.

  “Don’t know precisely. Eight, ten?” He held his yellow GPS in front of him like the handle of a fishing pole and scribbled notes furiously in his blue notebook, reeling in secrets.

  The tiny oranges that Justo had packed seemed to have skins of Kevlar. I struggled with mine like it was a Rubik’s Cube. I finally hacked away enough peel to get to the edible center. Having massacred the fruit, I shoved the entire thing in my mouth, seeds and all, as juice ran down my face. I stacked my tiny bits of peel into an apacheta and made a wish of my own, begging the apus to spare my toes on the descent ahead.

  Sure enough, within a few minutes we rounded a bend and entered Sound of Music country, snowy peaks framing deep green bowls. “Look how the valley has been perfectly rounded by glaciers,” John said, tracing the curve with the flat of his hand.
“You go ahead, Mark, I’m going to take some more video.” Each time I looked back, John was raising and lowering his Handycam, gazing around at the panorama. “God, this is just a beautiful place, isn’t it?” he said when he caught up to me.

  The rest of that afternoon we descended an Inca staircase, thirty-five hundred tall stone steps dropping almost a mile in elevation down toward Vitcos. With each long step down, the air seemed to warm a little more, and the alpine briskness gave way to Amazonian humidity. The ground off the trail was like a wet green washcloth, permanently soaked from the river that wound through the valley. John pointed out a pair of white birds. “Andean geese. Very territorial, one pair per valley. They mate for life. People eat almost any animal around here, but very few geese, out of respect.”

  Signs of civilization slowly began to reappear. A small house. A campesino plowing his potato fields on a distant hill, bent over pushing a big stick. A log fence that some enterprising farmer had built across the trail, to keep people out of his crops. (“God, some of these farmers are assholes,” John muttered as we scrambled across.) Stone walls started to divide the small plots of land into a quilt of green and yellow rectangles. A motorcycle roared in the distance. Electrical wires materialized overhead. Stray dogs came out to give us a sniff. Finally, when we had walked through four seasons in one day, the trail ended abruptly. We’d arrived in Huancacalle.

  TWENTY

  Hunting for Clues

  Cusco

  The expedition that would make Hiram Bingham famous was nearly canceled at the last minute. In April, two months before his departure date, his father-in-law, Alfred Mitchell, fell gravely ill. Bingham accompanied Alfreda on the six-day sea journey to her father’s bedside at his estate in Jamaica. Alfred rebounded briefly. Bingham returned to New York. Alfred died and Bingham returned to Jamaica once more, for his father-in-law’s funeral. Alfreda joyfully scribbled “Plan given up!” in her diary. Her premature relief suggests she’d forgotten her husband’s love of solving logistical problems. Bingham again returned to New York, settled his hysterically grieving mother-in-law in a hospital and bid good-bye to his wife and sons. When the steamship Marta left New York Harbor on June 8, the expedition director was aboard.

  Bingham kept track of an impressive number of particulars while preparing the 1911 expedition: begging friends for money, interrogating experts on the Incas about minor details, inspecting swatches of material from which tents were to be sewn. (Some one-hundred-year-old canvas samples were still in his files at Yale.) Bingham took immense pride in such control freakery. Just six paragraphs into Inca Land, the book that should have been a riveting account of the discoveries he made in 1911, Bingham stopped the narrative cold to lecture his readers about the exquisite care that he and the expedition’s naturalist, Harry Foote, had put into selecting provisions for the trip. By the time he got around to explaining that “we had to eliminate foods that contained a large amount of water, like French peas, baked beans, and canned fruits,” even an army quartermaster would have dozed off.

  Such diligence carried over into Bingham’s search for Vilcabamba. His first weeks in Peru were largely devoted to shoe-leather detective work. Within twenty-four hours of arriving in Lima, Bingham went to the National Library to meet with Carlos Romero, the historian whose archival research had raised the prospect that Vitcos, not Vilcabamba, was the Lost City of the Incas. (“He seems to be rather deaf and somewhat cross, but quite a scholar,” Bingham noted.) Bingham spent much of his brief time in Lima talking with Romero and copying passages out of one of the important new sources the scholar had found buried in the library’s collection, Father Antonio de la Calancha’s Coronica Moralizada, a “pious account of the missionary activities in Peru,” published in 1639. According to the historian Christopher Heaney, when Bingham asked Romero which had been the last Inca redoubt—Vitcos or Vilcabamba—Romero explained the reason for the confusion. Vilcabamba was the name of the province that the rebel Incas controlled. Vitcos was the name of the capital.

  It was an elegant solution with one serious flaw: Romero was only half right, as Bingham discovered when he read further into Calancha’s text. Manco had indeed established a new, remote capital at Vitcos after escaping from Cusco. But he had also constructed another capital, deeper in the jungle, when even Vitcos became unsafe. Suddenly, Heaney writes, “Bingham wasn’t searching for one lost city; he was searching for two.”

  Bingham continued his fact-finding, obtaining copies of maps from the Lima Geographical Society, including one made by the famous nineteenth-century geographer Antonio Raimondi, whom Bingham considered the “greatest of Peruvian explorers.” He added these to his copies of the Royal Geographical Society’s latest maps of southern Peru, believed to be definitive. He also had in his possession what may have been his secret weapon: a hand-drawn map he’d been given by a friend, the Harvard anthropologist William Farabee.

  In his final and best-known book, Lost City of the Incas, Bingham claimed that finding Vilcabamba and/or Vitcos was his only concrete objective as he advanced down the valley of the Urubamba. He arrived on the now-famous ridge at Machu Picchu, he wrote, “without the slightest expectation of finding anything more interesting than the ruins of two or three stone houses.” In an interview that Bingham gave to The New York Sun just before departing, however, which ran under the headline WILL SEEK LOST CITIES, he told a reporter: “There are current in the country many reports of the existence of ruined cities along the Urubamba River, which reports we hope to run down. Indians frequently bring these reports. Dr. Farabee, who was in charge of the Harvard expedition of four years ago, told me of a rumor, pretty well authenticated, which he had got from Indians, of a big city hidden away on the mountainside above the Urubamba Valley.” Machu Picchu was (and to the present still is) the only major “ruined city” ever found in the Urubamba Valley. “The map I sent you,” Farabee wrote to Bingham in early 1911, “is a composite of many more or less inexact and some fairly exact elements.” Were those elements exact enough to lead Bingham to Machu Picchu? It’s impossible to know.

  As Bingham approached Cusco by train, he was met outside the city by Albert Giesecke, the Philadelphia-born rector of the University of Cusco. Like the historian Romero, Giesecke is one of several essential supporting figures in the discovery of Machu Picchu. According to an interview Giesecke gave in 1962, he told Bingham that he’d recently traveled up the Urubamba Valley, along Bingham’s proposed route. At a place called Mandor Pampa, Giesecke said, he met a farmer named Melchor Arteaga, who operated a small tavern. Arteaga had spoken of some impressive ruins that sat on the mountain ridge above the trail and offered to take Giesecke to see them sometime. Because it was January, the rainy season, a quick trip up was out of the question.

  Bingham continued his sleuthing in Cusco. A businessman he’d befriended on his previous visit introduced the explorer to the owners of several nearby haciendas, the enormous farms that dominated the Peruvian countryside. One invited Bingham to stay at his family’s estate near Mandor Pampa, the spot where Albert Giesecke had suggested that Bingham stop. Another landowner, named Jose Pancorbo, assured Bingham that he would find significant ruins near a town called Puquiura. This news grabbed Bingham’s attention, for Puquiura was the name of the town that Father Calancha had mentioned in his Coronica as being a short distance from Vitcos.

  Later, a chatty old prospector informed Bingham that he had seen ruins “finer than Choquequirau” at a place called Huayna Picchu. This name echoed one that Bingham had read in the famous French explorer Charles Wiener’s book Perou et Bolivie; Wiener had been told several decades earlier “that there were fine ruins down the Urubamba Valley at a place called ‘Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu,’” Bingham recalled.

  Bingham’s departure from Cusco was briefly sidetracked when he and team geographer Isaiah Bowman stumbled across a human femur jutting out from a recently cut road outside of the city. Bowman convinced Bingham that the bones he found there were, in
fact, evidence of “a man of the glacial epoch . . . probably 30,000 years old.” The discovery would have rocked the world of anthropology by pushing back the estimated arrival of Homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere by thousands of years. Such a find would have instantly made the expedition’s leader as well known as Othniel Charles Marsh, a professor during Bingham’s undergraduate years who was described upon his death in 1899 as “probably Yale’s most famous scholar.” Marsh catapulted to world renown as one of the founding fathers of paleontology (triceratops and stegosaurus were but two of the eighty dinosaur species he found and named). Bingham could barely contain his excitement. “You can easily imagine how pleased I am to have actually discovered the bones myself,” he wrote to Alfreda.

  By the time he finally left Cusco on July 19, Bingham had cobbled together solid leads on three sets of Inca ruins, any one of which would be a major discovery. Multiple sources had suggested that there was something worth seeing on a ridge above Mandor Pampa, at a place that might be called Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu. He was confident that there were ruins close to the town of Puquiura—quite possibly those of Vitcos. Calancha’s Coronica had provided yet another tantalizing clue: “close to Vitcos . . . is a House of the Sun, and in it a white rock over a spring of water.” If Bingham could locate ruins that were near both Puquiura and this white rock, he would have solid proof of Manco’s capital in exile.

  The location of Bingham’s third objective, the lost city of Vilcabamba, final sanctuary of the Incas, was somewhat murkier. Spanish chronicles indicated that it was situated northwest of Cusco and that the first checkpoint on the road to Vilcabamba was the ancient fort of Ollantaytambo, about forty winding miles from Cusco. On muleback, Bingham was able to reach the site in two days.