Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  “Huh?”

  “Llactapata. It’s the site Bingham found when he came back to Peru in 1912. I was up there a few years ago. You can look right across the valley to Machu Picchu. Just incredible. It’s like what Machu Picchu used to be like before it was cleaned up—hardly been excavated.”

  “Of course, that Llactapata,” I said, trying to guess how the name was spelled so that I could look it up later. “Definitely can’t miss that.”

  “It’ll help you get an idea of how the Inca engineers and priests aligned all these sites with the sun and stars. Brilliant stuff.”

  If John didn’t look like a cum laude graduate of the French Foreign Legion, I’d have sworn we were tiptoeing into New Age territory. Cusco was a magnet for mystics. You couldn’t swing a crystal without hitting someone wearing feathers who called himself a spiritual healer. The big draw, of course, was Machu Picchu itself. Something about the cloud-swathed ruins in the sky had a dog-whistle effect on the sorts of New Agers who went in for astrological readings, sweat lodges, and Kabbalah bracelets. Travel brochures that arrived in my magazine office always seemed to imply that the stones of Machu Picchu practically glowed with positive energy. There was no single explanation for why the citadel Bingham had found was sacred ground, but that didn’t stop thousands of spiritual pilgrims from flocking to the site each year, hoping to experience a personal harmonic convergence.

  “All right. So we walk up to Llactapata, come down the far side, and we can either take the train to Aguas Calientes”—he looked at me over his notebook—“that’s the town at the base of Machu Picchu. Or we can walk along the rails and save the train fare.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Well, you know how things work in Peru, Mark. It all depends on who you ask.”

  “Do a lot of people sign up for this sort of trip?”

  “We used to get a few people every year—serious travelers. Hardly anyone does it anymore.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “About a month. Maybe less if the weather cooperates.”

  Represented by jars of breakfast condiments, the trip didn’t look especially daunting. About a hundred miles of walking, by my rough calculations. From the sound of what John had described, we’d go north, cut through the mountains, bear left toward the jungle, then double back toward Cusco. For the big finish, all we had to do was follow the river and turn right at Machu Picchu. This last part sounded like a pleasant afternoon stroll, something to kill a few hours and work up an appetite for dinner.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” John said. “Any questions so far?”

  I could only think of one. “Is this harder than the Inca Trail?”

  For a split second, John looked like he didn’t understand me. “Mark, this trek is a lot harder than the Inca Trail.”

  TWO

  Navel Intelligence

  Cusco, continued

  John and I agreed to meet the next day for breakfast to coordinate our schedules. He had tentative plans to spend several weeks hiking out to someplace that sounded like it was on the dark side of the moon, and I had commitments of my own. As I was starting to stand up to leave, I felt one of those commitments place a hand on my head. I looked up to see my thirteen-year-old son, Alex, standing over me. This trip to Cusco was both a reconnaissance mission and a father-son adventure. Though we’d both been to Peru many times because Alex’s mother is Peruvian (and I suppose by the law of matrilineal descent, so is he), we’d never been to the famous capital of the Inca empire.

  “I thought you were going to be down here for half an hour,” he said. “That was two hours ago. I’m starving.”

  We walked down to the Plaza de Armas, which had once been the center of pre-Columbian Cusco. The name of the Incas’ holiest city translates as “navel of the world.” From the plaza four roads led out toward the four regions of Tawantinsuyu—literally, “four parts together”—as the Incas called their empire. At its height from 1438 to 1532, Cusco had been the heart of a kingdom that ruled ten million subjects and stretched twenty-five hundred miles up and down the Andes. In this city so sacred that commoners were expelled each night had stood the Koricancha, the gold-plated temple of the sun. The great nineteenth-century historian William Prescott called it “the most magnificent structure in the New World, and unsurpassed, probably, in the costliness of its decorations by any building in the Old.” The absolute ruler of it all was the Sapa Inca, a hereditary monarch whose power derived not only from his parentage but from his religious status as the son of Inti, the sun god. So divine was the Inca’s person that everything he touched—whether the clothing he wore only once or the bones of meat he’d consumed—was ritualistically burned each year. Any stray hair that fell from his head was swallowed by one of his beautiful female attendants. Being a god, the Sapa Inca was considered immortal. When he died, his body was mummified, and he continued to reside in the palaces he’d inhabited while alive, providing imperial guidance through special interpreters when needed.

  Visitors to Machu Picchu are advised to spend a day or two in Cusco to adjust to the altitude, but it’s also a good place to acclimatize to the strangeness of the Andes. Like Hong Kong or Beirut, Cusco is an in-between city where cultures have collided, in this case those of the Incas and the Spaniards. Several epochs now clashed in the plaza where the Incas had once celebrated their military victories by stepping on the necks of their vanquished foes. Vintage VW Beetles cruised the square, passing in front of a McDonald’s advertising lattes and Wi-Fi, next to a seventeenth-century Spanish church built with stones cut by Inca masons before Spain existed. (Two blocks away the Koricancha sun temple was now the Santo Domingo monastery.) Small packs of stray dogs jogged through the tight alleyways of an ancient street grid, appearing and disappearing like ghosts. The only certainty was that no matter what restaurant, café, taxi or pharmacy Alex and I entered, some awful song from the 1980s would be playing. When we heard Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” for the third time, Alex turned to me with a pained look and asked, “Is this really what music used to sound like?”

  We met John early the following day at a fake English pub.

  His “martini explorer” comment had unnerved me a little—compared to Bingham, I was a white-wine spritzer explorer—so before committing to anything, I thought I should mention that it had been a while since I had slept outdoors. What came out of my mouth instead was “I might not be completely up-to-date on the latest tent-erecting methods.”

  “That’s all right,” John said. “We’ll need mules for a trip like this and the arrieros—the muleteers—can set up the tents. How do you feel about food?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You like cooked food?” John asked. I admitted that I did, in fact, have a weakness for victuals prepared over heat.

  “Right. When I travel solo, I usually prepare my own cereal mix and carry that with me. Fantastic stuff—all the nutrition you need. You’re going to need a lot of calories out there, maybe twice as many as usual, because the body starts breaking down after three days.” John was a serious clean-your-plate man; he’d finished his enormous breakfast, polished off the toast that Alex and I couldn’t get down, scraped the remaining yogurt out of everyone’s serving dishes and poured all the leftover dairy products into his coffee before downing it.

  “So let’s say we bring a cook. Shouldn’t be too expensive. We’ll need maybe four mules to carry the food and gear. Now, do you need a toilet, or can you go in the bush?”

  “You go to the bathroom in a bush?” Alex asked, his attention suddenly diverted from CNN’s World Business Today, the first television he’d seen in a week.

  “No, in the bush,” John said. “Like the forest.”

  “Oh man, that’s gross,” Alex said.

  I sensed that this was not the correct answer.

  “No, no. I can go outside,” I said.

  Alex’s facial expression made clear that this, alternative was no less gross.


  “Good! Because a toilet means an extra mule and chemicals sloshing around all over the place. How’s your health? Any history of heart trouble, or stroke? People think if you get into trouble out there that you can just pull out the satellite phone and call in a helicopter. They’re kidding themselves. That’s tough, tough country. You break a leg, even two days from the nearest hospital, and you’re walking out.”

  I assured him that other than a little thickness around the midsection and occasional sore knees, my health was fine.

  “You’ve got about six weeks between now and the time we leave. You’ve got to exercise. Focus on your core, your upper back and your joints. Your body’s going to take a lot of abuse on this trip.”

  When John excused himself for a minute, I turned to Alex. “What do you think of John?”

  “I guess he’s a little intense. But I like him. And he sure knows a lot more about Peru than you do.”

  On the way back to the hotel, John dictated a long list of equipment that I needed to buy for our excursion: drip-dry clothing for day, warm clothing for night, walking stick, rain gear, headlamp, sleeping bag liner, rip-proof daypack, waterproof cover for daypack. My pen ran out of ink. We stopped at a stationery store off the plaza to buy a new one. The shopkeeper, standing over a glass display case holding copies of Lost City of the Incas, stared at John—dressed, as I soon learned he always was, in full explorer garb—as if she’d seen him before.

  “You know who your friend looks like?” she asked me as I handed over my money. “Hiram Bingham.”

  THREE

  The Three Hirams

  Honolulu, Hawaii

  History’s greatest discoveries have usually resulted from explorers’ bravery and endurance. Neil Armstrong had to ride a gigantic flaming can of Sterno through the earth’s atmosphere before taking his one small step onto the moon; Marco Polo not only walked to China but waited twenty-four years to carry his tales of Kublai Khan’s empire back to Venice. Bingham employed a different set of abilities in finding Machu Picchu: organizational skill, careerist ambition and impatience. At a moment when young men were rushing to find the globe’s last great places, risk be damned, Bingham outpaced almost all of them by writing up formidable to-do lists and checking off their items at a furious pace.

  Bingham’s three most important expeditions to Peru—which he managed to squeeze into four years between 1911 and 1915, while raising seven young sons and holding down a teaching job at Yale—coincided with the heyday of Frederick Taylor’s new field of “scientific management,” the Progressive Era push to make the world a better place through the gospel of efficiency. Bingham’s files from that period—which are themselves a marvel of organization—reveal a personality fixated on maintaining total control. The “Official Circular of the Second Yale Peruvian Expedition,” which gave explicit instructions to each team member, including some Yale professors who outranked him, is exemplary of his passion for getting things done by leaving no detail uncovered: “Every one should see to it that his bowels have moved at least once a day,” he wrote in section 18, note 13B. “If the day has passed without a movement, one Compound Cathartic Pill should be taken the next morning a half hour or more before breakfast.”

  The other key element of Bingham’s winning formula, his ambition, was a gift from his forebears. In greater Polynesia, it is the explorer’s namesake grandfather, the Reverend Hiram Bingham I, who’s the famous one in the family. The Reverend Bingham arrived in what was then called the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) as the co-leader of a group of missionaries who sailed from Boston, landing in late March 1820. Only forty years had passed since the British sea captain James Cook made a return trip to the archipelago that he had just written onto the world map, whereupon he was clubbed and stabbed to death by a mob of islanders. The Reverend Bingham’s orders from his home office were to bring buttoned-up Yankee Christianity to this race of people who went about naked, swapped sexual partners and saw nothing socially unacceptable about human sacrifice.

  The ability to arrive uninvited in an alien land and convince one’s hosts that almost everything they believe is wrong requires a rather forceful personality. The Reverend Bingham sought to Christianize Hawaii by bending its inhabitants to his will, which conveniently was indistinguishable from the will of God. Combining a passion for hard work with paternalism toward native peoples—other traits he would pass along to his adventurous grandson—the Reverend Bingham undertook an extraordinary program of church and school building. (His best-known legacy is the Punahou School, now famous for graduating President Barack Obama.) His missionaries created a written form of the Hawaiian language, which they used to translate the Bible into the native tongue.

  Hiram Bingham I did little to hide his revulsion toward the chattering, “almost naked savages” who paddled out to meet him. Their appearance of “destitution, degradation and barbarism,” not to mention their “sunburnt, swarthy skins,” was nothing short of “appalling.” Bingham’s strong opinions didn’t entirely endear him to his fellow missionaries, either. When an illness that struck his wife required them to return to the East Coast, his superiors at the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions inquired of the settlers in Hawaii whether they’d like Bingham to return. The answer was an unambiguous no.1

  Having put Hawaii on the road to salvation, Hiram Bingham I envisioned his proselytizing heir, Hiram Bingham II, spreading the good word all the way to China; the elder Bingham told his son that he could be “the teacher of the Celestial Empire as your father was of the Kings and Queens of the Sandwich Islands.” The son aspired to duplicate his father’s success in a locale even more remote and ungodly than Hawaii. In 1856, Hiram II and his wife, Clara (a pair who, judging from their photograph, rivaled his parents as the least fun couple ever to sail the South Seas), embarked for the Gilbert Islands, a string of Pacific specks midway between Hawaii and Australia, where two island clans were engaged in a bloody war over control of the archipelago.

  Hiram II did repeat his father’s achievements, though on a more modest scale. A much more modest scale. He spent thirty-four years translating the Bible from Hebrew into Gilbertese, an idiom spoken by only a few thousand people. In nearly two decades of difficult missionary work, he tallied only a few dozen souls for the Lord, versus the two thousand strong congregation that his father had left behind in Honolulu. In 1875, seeking medical treatment for a crippling case of dysentery, he and the pregnant Clara left the Gilberts for good. The pair landed in Honolulu six days before Clara, age forty, gave birth to a boy on November 19, 1875. Had Hiram Bingham II possessed a stronger constitution, the son he named Hiram III might never have left the South Pacific, let alone found Machu Picchu.

  In Honolulu, the Binghams lived in a modest house purchased for them by the missionary board. “There, under the oppressive shadow of the first Hiram and the brooding presence of the second, the third Hiram spent his boyhood,” one of Hiram III’s sons later wrote. Growing up the only child in a household that contained four pious adults—his parents and his father’s two older, childless sisters—Hiram III was never allowed to forget that he was destined for great things. (Or maybe predestined, since the Binghams were strict Calvinists.) The family read the Bible literally, and Hiram II seems to have adopted Proverbs 23:13–14 as an unofficial Eleventh Commandment: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”

  It is perhaps not surprising that at a young age, Hiram Bingham III developed a passion for spending time outside of the home.

  In Inca Land, Hiram III’s first book about his discoveries in Peru, he compared the scenery near Machu Picchu to the lush volcanic topography of his native Hawaii. His father had, he wrote, “taught me as a boy to be fond of climbing the mountains of Oahu and Maui and to be appreciative of the views which could be obtained by such expenditure of effort.” Also passed down were the Bingham fam
ily’s wanderlust and distaste for making small plans. At age twelve, Hiram III withdrew $250 he had saved for his college education and bought passage on the steamship C. W. Bryant. He’d drawn up a detailed plan. First he’d go to New York City and build a bankroll as a newsboy; then he’d move on to England and, eventually, Africa. When the Bryant’s departure was delayed, Bingham’s accomplice got cold feet and told his own father of the escape plan.

  Hiram III sailed for the mainland a few years later, at age sixteen. His father, having finally completed his Gilbertese Bible, now needed to oversee its publication in New York City. Hiram III was enrolled at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a prep school traditionally favored by America’s wealthiest and most powerful families. (Both presidents Bush attended.) Hiram Bingham III paid his own tuition and worked each day in a campus boardinghouse, and later as a tutor, to cover other expenses. A slim, gawky transfer student—“I am not fit for athletics,” he wrote as a teenager, after he’d sprouted past six feet in height—whose devout parents forbade him even to dance, he did not make a huge social splash among the children of the Gay Nineties elite. “It is my purpose to save souls for Christ,” he wrote to his approving parents back in Hawaii.

  In the autumn of 1894, Hiram III matriculated at Yale, his father’s alma mater. By the end of his first year he’d made a name for himself on campus by helping the freshman debate team defeat Harvard. The unlikeliness of this victory, Yale’s first in debate against its most hated rival, may be guessed at by a headline in The Boston Globe: HARVARD FRESHMEN BEATEN. When Bingham was hoisted onto the shoulders of his classmates, he found that he rather liked the adulation. From that moment he blossomed in New Haven, pledging a fraternity and joining the glee club. He even caved in to social pressure to dance—it would insult party hostesses not to, he reasoned—and begged his mother’s forgiveness.