Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  Bingham was unconvinced by either the story or Nuñez’s pleas until the prefect played two aces: first, he claimed that Choquequirao had never been visited by a white man. (“A statement that I later found to be incorrect,” Bingham subsequently grumbled.) Second, Nuñez stressed that Peruvian president Augusto Leguia had personally requested that all excavation work at Choquequirao be put on hold until the esteemed Dr. Bingham from the scientific congress could have a look and give his opinion of the site’s archaeological worth.

  Bingham and Hay left Cusco on February 1, at the peak of the rainy season in the Peruvian Andes. (Crazy weather is an annual feature of Peru’s austral summer. Storms near the end of January in 2010 washed away the train line to Machu Picchu; the Inca Trail is closed altogether every February.) This particular rainy season was the heaviest in twenty-five years, and the group encountered “well-nigh impassible bogs, swollen torrents” and “avalanches of boulders and trees.” Within hours of departing Abancay, they could hear the Apurimac River roaring thousands of feet below them. The route down to their riverside campsite corkscrewed back and forth, each segment about twenty feet long. After sunset the group continued on “the tortuous trail” in complete darkness.

  About three hundred feet from the bottom, the mule Bingham was riding pulled up abruptly at a small waterfall that sliced through the path. The scientific delegate got off and weighed his options. “As I could not see the other side of the chasm, I did not dare to jump alone, but remounted my mule, held my breath, and gave him both spurs at once.”

  It was a leap of faith that would set him on the road to Machu Picchu.

  NINE

  Beware of Fat-Suckers

  Lima, Peru

  Peru is a wonderful place. It is also wonderfully weird. The first time I visited, in 1997, several people I met in Lima warned me to take extra care when driving, because local thieves had perfected an ingenious new robbery technique. Near isolated intersections, street urchins heated discarded spark plugs over fifty-five-gallon drum fires. When a car stopped at a traffic light, the young thieves pressed a white-hot plug against its passenger-side window, causing it to shatter. Before the driver realized what was happening, a live rat was tossed into his or her lap. During the ensuing wrestling match with the (presumably agitated) rodent, the thief helped himself to handbags or anything else that looked inviting. If the driver understandably chose to exit the vehicle, the thief hopped in and drove off with his bewhiskered accomplice.

  Peruvians have an insatiable appetite for such stories. The autumn that I arrived in Cusco, exactly a hundred years after Hiram Bingham first heard the legend of the Cradle of Gold, the news was dominated by reports that police had busted a ring of killers. The criminals had murdered sixty people and siphoned out their fat in order to sell it by the liter to shadowy international cosmetics manufacturers. A couple of frantic weeks passed before the police realized that no one had actually been reported missing in the area where the homicides had supposedly taken place. It sounded like something out of a Mario Vargas Llosa novel. Actually, it was something out of a Vargas Llosa novel. In Death in the Andes, Indian villagers blame pishtacos, a breed of adipose tissue–sucking vampires, for three mysterious disappearances.

  Peru’s political history, too, reads like something that might have flowed from the pen of a Nobel laureate, and not just because Vargas Llosa nearly won the presidency not long ago. Let’s just look at the last quarter-century, a period of relative stability in Peru. Alan Garcia, a young, handsome Kennedyesque liberal, was elected to lead the nation when he was just thirty-six. It’s difficult to pinpoint which dubious achievement Garcia was subsequently most loathed for: allowing the inflation rate to soar to over 20,000 percent annually; failing to halt the growth of the Shining Path terrorist movement; or turning a blind eye toward corruption, the most public example of which was the $300 million spent on his Train to Nowhere, an elevated railway project whose ghostly concrete pillars still haunt the medians of some of Lima’s nicest avenues. Everyone assumed that the dashing Vargas Llosa would be elected in 1990. He lost out to Alberto Fujimori, the nerdy son of Japanese immigrants. Fujimori essentially declared himself dictator and crushed both the Shining Path and inflation by whatever violent methods worked. (Aurita remembers watching an announcement on Peruvian television that effective immediately, gasoline prices were increasing twentyfold; the next morning, in place of the swirling pandemonium of Lima traffic, one could hear the sound of birds singing and children playing in the empty streets.) When the head of the national intelligence service was found to have videotaped thousands of politicians, judges and journalists accepting bribes, Fujimori escaped to Japan, where he faxed in his resignation. He’s now back in Peru—in prison.

  Alejandro Toledo, a former shoeshine boy and Peru’s first indigenous president, was elected in 2001 as an anticorruption candidate despite reports that he had been spotted with prostitutes and had tested positive for cocaine. (He had an unassailable defense: he’d been kidnapped and drugged by Fujimori’s henchmen.) Meanwhile, Toledo’s French wife, Eliane Karp-Toledo, almost single-handedly blew up an agreement that Yale had reached with Peru’s government to return artifacts that Bingham had taken to New Haven. The most recent election, in 2006, came down to a two-man race: a retired army officer, under investigation for murder, who vowed to nationalize foreign businesses, versus a reasonable-sounding elder statesman, back from a long trip abroad with at least one hundred extra pishtaco-tempting pounds packed onto his frame. Alan Garcia was back, running on a platform that boiled down to “I was an idiot last time.” Garcia won. A few years later, he announced new plans to build an elevated train system in Lima.

  It’s possible that all this craziness is just geography as destiny. Peru’s borders contain some of the world’s most varied topography and climate. Measured in square miles, the country is not especially large. On a globe it looks like a swollen California. Within that space, though, are twenty-thousand-foot peaks, the world’s deepest canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), unmapped Amazon jungle and the driest desert on earth. Peru is an equatorial country that depends on glaciers for drinking water. It’s one of the world’s hot spots for seismic and volcanic activity. (Both Lima and Cusco have been leveled by earthquakes; the country’s second-largest city, Arequipa, sits beneath a smoking peak that could blow its top at any time.) Scientists have calculated that there are thirty-four types of climatic zones on the face of the earth. Peru has twenty of them. “In Inca Land one may pass from glaciers to tree ferns within a few hours,” Bingham wrote, still astonished years after arriving. I was about to see for myself.

  TEN

  Peruvian Standard Time

  Cusco

  Six weeks after my first meeting with John Leivers, I was sitting in the Cusco offices of the adventure outfitter Amazonas Explorer, drinking my fourth cup of instant coffee and waiting for Juvenal Cobos to arrive. One of the things about Peru that I’d found it hardest to adjust to—even more so than the popularity of Nescafé in a country that grows some of the finest coffee beans in the world—was la hora peruana, Peruvian Time. This is the code, indecipherable to North Americans, by which Peruvians determine the latest possible moment that it is acceptable to arrive for an appointment. The statement “I’ll be right back” can mean just that, or it can mean that the speaker is about to depart via steamship for Cairo. The habit drove Bingham bananas and hasn’t improved over time, despite a widespread government campaign to combat tardiness a few years back. By one estimate, each Peruvian arrives a total of 107 hours late each year, a number that is shocking only because it seems so low. My friend Esteban, an Ivy League–trained businessman living in Lima, needed to lie to his own mother to get her to his wedding on time. He told her the ceremony began at noon when it actually started at 4 P.M. She arrived at ten minutes to four, red-faced and puffing.

  Even after ninety minutes of gritty coffee and idle chitchat, I wasn’t too upset, though, because we were waiting for
a legend. In terms of exploring in the Andes, getting Juvenal Cobos to lead my team of mules was the equivalent of pasting a flyer up at the local Guitar Center inviting people to a jam session and having Eric Clapton show up in my basement. The Cobos family had worked on virtually every important expedition in the region we were heading to since the 1950s, including two famous attempts to follow up on Bingham’s 1911 search for the Lost City of the Incas. Juvenal was also, John told me gravely, famous for padding the bill with extra mules.

  I had noticed three things about John. One, he never removed his hat. Ever. Two, he was a bit of a misanthrope. He often spoke wistfully about a volcanic explosion that had happened 73,000 years earlier, almost wiping humanity off the face of the earth. John thought that Peru was destroying itself through population growth that could be reversed only by a huge flu pandemic, that the long march of civilization had peaked a few years earlier, and that the world had entered a deep, probably irreversible decline. “In some places, I wouldn’t be surprised if we went back to the Dark Ages soon,” he told me. I wondered if the guides who led luxury mystical excursions to Machu Picchu started their tours by scaring the bejeezus out of their clients.

  The third thing I’d gathered about John was that he was a little tight with his money. It wasn’t that he was cheap, really, just that his sense of fair play was offended when he felt that something was overpriced, which was often. When I returned to Cusco, we’d eaten lunch in a restaurant that had once been the finest house in Peru, an Inca palace so large, the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega recalled, that sixteen men on horseback could joust inside it. I couldn’t stop staring at the gem-cut stone walls. John gawked at the menu, fixated on the price of a bowl of soup. “Really, what’s in there? Noodles, broth cubes, maybe a little egg. Fifty cents of ingredients sold for five dollars! That’s immoral.”

  We sat in the Amazonas Explorer office a few minutes longer, until John finally got impatient. He stood up and started yanking the contents of what appeared to be a mobile field hospital out of two gigantic bombproof suitcases and spread them over the floor.

  “Take a seat over here, Mark, you’ll need to know where these things are in case anything happens. Our policy is we avoid all problems. Now, this is for broken bones,” he said, holding up some sort of bendable stiff material that evidently wrapped around a fracture. “Satellite phone—fifty dollars just for the phone card, and that only lasts an hour and expires in a month. Epi pen. God, these things are expensive. They can save your life, though. You have any serious allergies?

  “Now we’ll get into the serious stuff. Let’s see. I don’t think we’ll need this many bandages. Metallic blanket for hypothermia. Bronchodilator. You have bronchial problems at altitude, and whew, that’s trouble. Any blood pressure problems?” I assured him that I’d been working out like a madman, which was true. I’d found fear of failure and death to be excellent motivators.

  Maria, the assistant office manager at Amazonas Explorer, approached carrying two oxygen tanks. Did we want the large one or the small one?

  “Let’s think about that for a second,” John said, looking at me. “We’ll take the . . . small one.”

  Juvenal Cobos entered the room, two hours late, shook hands all around and eased himself into a chair. He was seventy-four years old, a great-grandfather. He took one look at the pile of stuff on the floor and exhaled loudly. “We’re going to need more mules,” he said. Juvenal and John argued for about ten minutes in Spanish with Juvenal repeatedly hinting ciertas cosas—certain things—needed to be considered in the final price. John wanted that teniamas un acuerdo, we had an agreement. I finally figured out that they were haggling over the muleteers’ daily wage. Juvenal was angling for an extra seventy cents a day per man.

  “If it’ll help keep the peace, I’m happy to pay the difference,” I told John. “Four mules, five mules—let’s just get off on the right foot.”

  “It’s your money,” John said. “I just want what’s fair and reasonable.”

  Mule business settled, we walked over to the kitchen to meet Justo, our cook. The Quechua are a small people. Children in Aurita’s extended family have long looked forward to the day that they stand taller than Nati, a rite of passage that in Alex’s case occurred just after his tenth birthday. Skeletons that Bingham’s team found showed that the average height for workers at Machu Picchu was about five feet, a measurement that hasn’t budged over the five intervening centuries. But Justo was short even by Andean standards, about four feet six. He looked like an anime version of Ricardo Montalban, if the star of Fantasy Island had capped his front teeth with gold and been left in the clothes dryer on high heat for a couple of years. John called him “Hummingbird,” because Justo was constantly in motion and talked nonstop.

  “Nice to meet you Señor Mark nice to see you Señor John could you pass me that ketchup thank you do you like yogurt we’ve got yogurt have some tea.”

  “He averages about fifteen thousand words a day,” John said as Justo fluttered around the kitchen opening and closing drawers and cabinets, his chatter never pausing. “I’ve counted.”

  ELEVEN

  On the Road

  Westbound on the Capac Ñan

  Justo was still talking the next morning as he and I made the rounds at a market outside of Cusco, plotting to commit a Class B felony. As the paying client, I was obligated to provide the Peruvian team members with as much coca as they could chew. The bulging plastic sack that we purchased—roughly the dimensions of a family-size bag of Doritos—would earn me a mandatory five years to life in the States for possession with intent to distribute. In the highlands it was just the final item on the shopping list. Tea brewed with coca leaves is served everywhere in Peru—it’s supposed to mitigate the symptoms of soroche, or altitude sickness. I’d sampled it on a few occasions without ever feeling the urge to dance the night away.

  There were five of us in the Land Cruiser: John, me, Justo, Juvenal and Edgar, our driver. We followed the route of the old Capac Ñan, the great Inca highway. In the glory days of the Inca empire, which lasted less than a century, this system of roads was one of the marvels of the pre-Columbian world. Stretching more than ten thousand miles in length, the Royal Road, as the Spaniards dubbed it, was the nervous system of the empire.

  Peru is diligent about protecting its most famous archaeological treasures. There’s an entire branch of the government, the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, or INC, charged with overseeing the maintenance of places like Sacsahuaman. With the exception of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, though, the old Capac Ñan is disappearing beneath asphalt like the road we were driving on. The loss is doubly sad because the trails were built to last forever, over some of the most diverse terrain in the world. “The INC says that there are twenty miles of original Inca trails left in this area,” John said from the backseat. I had assumed that there was only the one Inca Trail (capital T) in Peru, but as John explained, there were actually many Inca trails (small t) crisscrossing the former empire. “I know of at least a hundred and fifty miles’ worth, some of which you’re going to see. They’re fantastic. Of course there’ll be twenty miles left by the time the INC’s done protecting them.”

  The road system is believed to be the work of the greatest Inca of all, Pachacutec. The name means “he who shakes the earth.” If the Incas were the Romans of the Western Hemisphere, then Pachacutec was one part Julius Caesar and one part Romulus—a more or less historical figure who expanded a modest state near Cusco into Tawantinsuyu. Separating fact from fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Saddam Hussein published in Arabic, and you’ll get some idea of the problem historians face.

  Using Pachacutec’s roads, fleet-footed messengers called chasquis could relay a message from Quito to Cusco�
��a thousand mountainous miles—in twelve days. For comparison’s sake, that was about half the average speed of the Pony Express—though the chasquis were running through terrain more rugged than the Rockies (and a lot more rugged than Kansas). According to some accounts, the chasquis carried fish from the Pacific to Cusco, three hundred miles away, where it arrived fresh enough to serve to the Inca.

  Near sundown, having left the asphalt behind hours earlier, the Land Cruiser bounced through the tiny town of Cachora. At the very end of the road, we pulled up at the farm of a fellow named Octavio. We’d expected to be met by one muleteer who would assist Juvenal. We were greeted by two. Mateo was the older of the pair, about fifty. He wore unlaced rubber boots and a wool cap and had a profile that belonged on a medieval coin. Julián, who was in his late thirties, had youthful features that were not dimmed by his Boy Scout–style shirt and wispy beard. He was the special surprise guest, necessary because Juvenal had decided to provide us with six mules instead of the agreedupon five. “Don’t worry, don’t worry, Julián will work just for tips,” Juvenal said when John asked what was going on. This appeared to be news to Julián.

  I asked John how I might help in setting up camp. He seemed to think it was a better idea for me to stay out of the muleteers’ way. “These guys only have two speeds—absolute idleness and complete chaos,” he told me. Our four-man team shifted into second gear as they got to work, pumping water, passing propane tanks and erecting the gigantic orange cook tent shaped like a circus big top, inside which Justo set to work peeling and chopping. Edgar climbed atop the Land Cruiser and threw my big bag to Juvenal, who caught it and ran up the hillside. Mateo and Julián set up tents for John and me. John crawled into his and spent about fifteen minutes dragging things around, grunting as if he were trying to subdue an intruder. I unrolled my virgin sleeping bag, stared at it for a moment, then stepped outside, uncertain what to do with myself. The view looking north was astonishing—a panorama of jagged peaks converging in the snowcapped Mount Padreyoc, nineteen thousand feet high. Two kids ran past down the dirt road, barefoot, pushing an old wheel with a stick.