Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  Ollantaytambo is one of the masterpieces of Inca architecture. Seventeen imposing terraces (which an awestruck Bingham wrote “will stand for ages to come as monuments to the energy and skill of a bygone race”) lead up to a fortress where six enormous rectangular granite slabs stand watch over the Urubamba River valley, like the world’s largest royal flush. Unlike Machu Picchu, about which next to nothing is known for certain, Ollantaytambo appears prominently in histories written by both the Incas and the Spaniards, for it was the scene of the greatest victory that the native Peruvians ever enjoyed against their invaders. During Manco’s siege of Cusco, during which the former puppet Inca came close to ejecting the conquistadors from his capital, the fortress of Ollantaytambo served as the rebel headquarters. Early one morning, one of the Pizarro brothers led a sneak attack, hoping to end the revolt by carrying off the Inca as prisoner.

  The Spaniards were dumbfounded by what they saw when the sun rose: Manco Inca, holding a spear and issuing commands to his troops as he rode a stolen horse atop Ollantaytambo’s highest terrace. In an instant, the historian William Prescott wrote, “the air was darkened with innumerable missiles, stones, javelins and arrows, which fell like a hurricane on the troops, and the mountains rang to the wild warwhoop of the enemy.”

  Anyone who’s hiked the Inca Trail also knows Ollantaytambo as a place where one can hop off the train to reach the starting point of the four- or five-day trek. Whether one continues west on foot or by rail, it’s impossible not to be struck by how quickly the landscape changes. The desolate, mountainous terrain that has held steady since Cusco segues rapidly into tropical forest dotted with orchids—the beginnings of the Amazon basin. Virtually every explorer who came before Bingham had been required, at this point, to choose between two grueling mountain passes—both “higher than the top of Pikes Peak,” Bingham noted—to move farther west beyond the well-mapped environs of the Sacred Valley near Cusco. Luckily for Bingham, a new mule road had been blasted out along the riverbank in 1895, to allow plantation owners an easier route for transporting their goods. Bingham was exaggerating only slightly when he claimed the new road allowed him access to a “mountainous wilderness” between the two routes that “had been inaccessible for almost four centuries.”

  Bingham continued down the riverside, accompanied by two expedition members and a soldier known only as Sergeant Carrasco. His services had been provided on the orders of President Leguia, and Carrasco’s ability to speak Quechua would prove invaluable. On July 23, three Yale men dressed like Connecticut deer hunters, with a military escort in his brass-buttoned uniform and a few anonymous Andean muleteers and porters, arrived at a small hut known as La Maquina. It had been named after a large piece of machinery, rusted beyond recognition, that sat nearby. Bingham guessed that the iron wheels had once been intended for a sugar farm down the valley.

  The road began to narrow, so the men found a place to camp along the riverbank. “Opposite us, beyond the huge granite boulders which interfered with the progress of the surging stream, was a steep mountain clothed with thick jungle,” Bingham later recalled. He had arrived at Mandor Pampa. The group was soon sought out by Melchor Arteaga, the man whom Albert Giesecke said had told him about the possible ruins. Bingham explained through Sergeant Carrasco what they had come searching for. Arteaga replied that “there were some very good ruins in this vicinity,” according to Bingham, “in fact, some excellent ones on top of the opposite mountain, called Huayna Picchu, and also on a ridge called Machu Picchu.”

  This sounded promising. They made a plan to take a look in the morning.

  In his books recounting the story of Machu Picchu, Bingham paused the action here and addressed readers directly. “Suffice it to say that the ruins he showed me were not near a ‘great white rock over a spring of water’ and that there was no evidence that this was Vitcos, Manco’s capital for which we were looking,” Bingham wrote. Instead of chronicling what happened next on July 24, he skipped ahead a couple days, fast-forwarding past the most important twenty-four hours of his life, a narrative trick that allowed him to save the juiciest part of his tale for the end.

  John and I were following Bingham by the book. Which is why we, too, were about to encounter Vitcos.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sixpac Manco

  Huancacalle, Peru

  Two towns sit below the ruins of Vitcos: Puquiura and Huancacalle. Remember those bucolic little burgs that courier companies used to feature in their commercials to demontrate how willing they were to deliver packages to the ends of the earth? (“Look, my grandson in America spent the equivalent of three oxen to send me this handmade birthday card!”) Puquiura looked like that. Compared to Huancacalle—where we were staying—Puquiura was like Vegas. Huancacalle had two streets and a few dozen houses, almost all jerry-built of mud brick. None of them seemed a wise place to be visiting when one of Peru’s infamous earthquakes struck.

  Far and away the nicest thing going in Huancacalle was the Sixpac Manco, the hostelry run by the Cobos family. If there is a finer place in the universe to stay for $5 a night, I have yet to encounter it. The second part of the hotel’s name was taken from the rebel Inca. The Sixpac part refers to the preferred beverage of the explorer Vincent Lee, a Cobos family friend who helped bankroll the operation.

  John and I wandered into the Sixpac courtyard with the mules and unloaded our gear. The muleteers lined up to be paid for the first part of the journey, and I handed each his tip with a handshake and a “muchisimas gracias.” Julián, by far the least experienced of the crew, was the most excited to get paid. (Probably because I pretended to have forgotten Juvenal’s earlier suggestion that Julián would work for tips.) He was also the only muleteer who gave the traditional soft Quechua handshake. Bingham had been so unnerved by this “extremely fishy” grip that he had a group of men hooked up to a dynamometer and found the average squeeze strength to be “only about half of that found among American white adults of sedentary habits.” The soft handclasps I received along the trail seemed more like acts of gentleness than failures of manliness; each time I met a stranger, I felt like I was being handed a baby bird.

  Mateo and Julián marched off to their nearby farms to spend a few days with their families. Juvenal walked up the hill to see his wife. Justo unpacked his gear in the Sixpac Manco kitchen. John disappeared into his room and threw his stuff around noisily for a few minutes. I had nothing to do except attend to my filthy clothes, which I washed out in the garden with a bar of soap and a scrub brush. My two shirts and two pairs of pants took half an hour to get passably clean. When I finished, I peeled the electrical tape off my toes and took a luxurious lukewarm shower in the open-air bathroom. The water was supposed to be heated by an electric contraption attached to the shower head that had all sorts of wires sticking out of it; this in turn was connected directly to the town’s main power cable. “Electrocuted while bathing” seemed a rather pathetic cause of death. So I let the tepid water run over me and tried to think of what I might be doing in New York at that hour. Then I realized that I didn’t even know what day it was.

  Huancacalle was a lot less isolated than it had been just a few years ago. The Cobos family had a telephone that could make calls within Peru, though service was dependent on the positions of satellites and could be disrupted by things like high winds, clouds and sun spots. Juvenal’s daughter Rosa said that it was possible to make international calls at a shop just up the hill, the one with the parabolic antenna outside. I wasn’t sure exactly how many days it had been since I’d spoken with Aurita, but I did know it was the longest stretch since we’d collided on that New York street sixteen years earlier. Rosa giggled and shooed me toward the door when I explained why I needed to find a phone, but John seemed baffled by my desire to call home.

  “I call my family back in Australia once a year, and they’re fine with it,” he said. He had spoken with his eighty-nine-year-old mum not long before we’d departed. “If she gets a call she knows somethin
g’s gone wrong.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why you’ve never been married,” I said.

  Walking up to the general store, I felt like a gunslinger strolling through Dodge City. The road was dirt, the buildings were dusty, and the only people visible were peering out at me from dark windows and doorways. Only one thing felt off: I was marching up a crazily steep hill. The sheriff in a Huancacalle gunfight would need to aim his pistol as if he were shooting skeet.

  I found the store and stepped over the wooden dog gate in the doorway. The proprietress, a young mother in her twenties, stood behind a glass case filled with candy, toiletries and matches. It smelled like dried soup mix and disinfectant inside the store, like it does sometimes in old people’s houses.

  “Good day, it would please me to make an international call to the Estados Unidos,” I said in carefully measured Spanish.

  From behind me a loud voice interjected. “Well, someone wants to make a call to THE EH-STAH-DOS OO-NEE-DOS.” I hadn’t noticed that the shoplady’s husband was sitting at a table in the corner, picking apart a chicken carcass and drinking (judging from the impressive collection of empty Cusqueña bottles) his eleventh beer of the afternoon.

  “Um, yes, that is correct. It is possible?”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman said. “Let me find the code for the United States.”

  “EH-STAH-DOS OO-NEE-DOS!” shouted the husband, pointing at me with a drumstick bone. It was hard to tell if he was angry, or mocking my pronunciation, or practicing his geography.

  I dialed, but no one answered. I dialed again. Then I did a quick calculation and remembered—of course, no one was home because it was Columbus Day in the United States. The arrival of Europeans in the New World was not a major cause for celebration in the Andes.

  “It seems to me that no one is in the house,” I said to the woman. “I am going to call another time later.”

  “Call the EH-STAH-DOS OO-NEE-DOS,” her husband added. He had a look in his eye that any American who has spent time around non-American drunks may recognize, the leer that precedes either projectile vomiting or a lecture about the CIA. Sometimes both. I hopped the dog gate in the doorway and hurried downhill.

  Back at the Sixpac Manco, Justo had prepared a feast of stuffed potatoes with breaded chicken cutlets, choclo (Peruvian corn with huge white kernels), and rice pudding for dessert. I had read somewhere that chewing coca helped the body break down carbohydrates, but I’d begun to wonder if the Spaniards had banished green vegetables along with the Incas’ pagan rituals. Justo dug deep into one of his conga drums and produced a box of red wine. John poured out mugs for Rosa, Juvenal, Justo and the two of us. Justo and Juvenal stood and lifted their drinks overhead, shouted “Salud!,” tossed the wine back in a single gulp, sat back down and resumed the conversation they were having in Quechua. John pulled out his maps of Vitcos and tried to explain how one of the most important sites in the Inca empire could be forgotten for centuries even though it was located a short walk from two towns.

  Part of the obfuscation may have arisen from popularity of the name Vilcabamba. In the region to the west of Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba is about as common a name as Peachtree is in Atlanta. On John’s maps, I could see a Vilcabamba region, which spread across hundreds of square miles; a Vilcabamba River, which flowed west of the Urubamba; the Cordillera Vilcabamba, a mountain range that included the apu Salcantay and Machu Picchu; a town called Vilcabamba the New, founded by the Spanish; and the archaeological site of Vilcabamba the Old, also known as Espiritu Pampa, where we’d be heading in a few days. During Manco’s reign, the entire rebel state was known as Vilcabamba.

  An hour later, my head numb with dancing Vilcabambas, Quechua gossip and Chilean merlot, I walked back to my room, climbed beneath clean sheets and thick wool blankets and slept the sleep of the dead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The More Things Change

  Lost in Puquiura

  Andean folk are my kind of people—early risers. At five-thirty in the morning at Sixpac Manco the kitchen was full. Florencia Cobos, Juvenal’s wife, was collecting scraps for their guinea pigs; she wrapped the fruit peelings and moldy bread in a large manta, a hand-woven cloth. She dressed traditionally, with layered skirts, a long braid and a tall hat that John Smith might have worn on a date with Pocahontas. Her daughter Rosa wore a Polartec fleece pullover and jeans. She fed twigs into the wood-burning stove and told me she was stressed out because her son, who was attending school in Cusco, needed a laptop and it had been a slow year for tourism. Justo prepared breakfast—twenty tiny trout that he had pulled out of the river, God knows when—and listened to his radio, which was blaring pop songs sung in Quechua. The tune sounded awfully familiar. Or familiarly awful.

  “Justo, I feel like I know this song. What’s he singing?”

  “Oh, this song, Señor Mark? This is a great one. It goes: “Es el ojo del tigre . . .” Translation: It’s the eye of the tiger. “I’m going over to Puquiura today to buy some chicken. You can’t get anything in Huancacalle on Tuesdays. You want to visit the hospital to get some cream for those bug bites?”

  What became an epic search for a tube of anti-itch cream later reminded me of a couple of major beefs that Bingham had with the Andean people. One was that it was nearly impossible to get anyone started on a project. His writings are loaded with crabby memories of cooling his heels while some Indian muleteer took half the morning to get the animals loaded and ready to move.

  His second big complaint was that Peruvians would tell him whatever they thought he wanted to hear, just to make him happy. A foreman at one hacienda near Huancacalle told Bingham that he had seen spectacular ruins at a spot with a name that sounded like Yurak Rumi—Quechua for White Rock, one of the key clues to finding Vitcos. After waiting several days for a trail to be cleared, Bingham marched for several hours, only to find that this Yurak Rumi “consisted of the ruins of a single little rectangular Inca storehouse.” A decade later, Bingham was still piqued at the incident. “In this country one never can tell whether such a report is worthy of credence,” he wrote. “‘He may have been lying’ is a good footnote to affix to all hearsay evidence.” I had been advised that when traveling outside of Lima, I should get a second and third opinion even if I was just asking the time.

  The only driver available in Huancacalle twice refused to take Justo and me to Puquiura; at first, he said, because he was finishing a very important bottle of soda, and then because it wasn’t worth his while to take only a single fare. After about half an hour sitting on the hood of his car, listening to Justo hold forth about the culinary preferences of past clients for whom he had cooked (“Italians—all they want is pasta, even at breakfast; with Spaniards, it’s ham, ham, ham”), the driver capitulated and drove us the two miles in about seven minutes.

  Puquiura was a town of maybe a thousand inhabitants, with a central square and main street lined with brightly painted buildings. It also had a military checkpoint with a gate, manned by an armed soldier—presumably a holdover from Peru’s antiterrorism campaigns of the late eighties. Justo marched through with a mock salute to the guard. We asked an old woman where the hospital was.

  “Go down to the river, you can’t miss it,” she said with a smile. We went down to the river. No hospital.

  “It’s up on the hill,” said a man carrying a bucket of water. We went up the hill. No hospital.

  “You need to go back to the center,” said a shopkeeper at the end of the road. We knew this couldn’t be right because we’d already done two laps of the middle of town.

  Finally, a guy in a shirt that said (in English): NEW JERSEY, SINCE 1956, pointed at a building with a large cross painted on it. I bought some bug cream from the well-stocked hospital pharmacy—because of my language limitations, the pharmacist initially brought me a box of hemorrhoidal suppositories that contained cocaine as their active ingredient—and we walked back through town, on a futile search for poultry. An entire fleet of taxis extended
down the main street, but the dispatching system allowed the first driver in line to wait as long as he wished for a promising fare. Taking us back to Huancacalle didn’t qualify. No other driver was allowed to jump the line. Justo and I bought a bag of popcorn and some chicha morada (the nonalcoholic purple version of the corn drink) and sat on a bench for forty-five minutes, watching the dozen or so drivers smoke and pick their noses as they waited for some big spender to show up and ask for a ride to Mexico City. Finally, we walked back. It had taken me four hours to buy a tube of bug cream. I was beginning to sympathize a bit with Bingham.

  Back in town, I stopped by the empty general store and tried my call again. To my surprise, Nati answered. “Hola, señor explorador!” she said. “Have you seen any of my cousins?”

  “You have cousins around here?”

  “No, my cousins the Incas!” She laughed and handed the phone to Aurita.

  “Hi, honey, where are you? We got your message that you were in a place called Huancacalle, but it doesn’t show up on Google Maps.”

  “That doesn’t really surprise me,” I said, looking over my shoulder out the doorway. Every word I spoke was echoed back to me on a twosecond delay, as if I were shouting into the bottom of a well. “We’re sort of in the middle of nowhere. How’s everything there?”

  “Let’s see. Of course everybody misses you. Alex took third place at his cross-country meet. Lucas and Magnus are fighting over the medal. Yesterday a cat came into the clinic with a tumor the size of a tennis ball.”

  I was just warming up to the sounds of normal familial contentment—rarely has a description of one’s stack of waiting mail sounded so inviting—when I noticed a digital timer on the phone, very rapidly counting down the few seconds I had left on my prepaid phone card. “Um, I’m sorry, baby, but we’re about to get cut off. I love you and . . .” Click. I walked downhill through the deserted town.