Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  A story in The Economist a few years back cited Peruvian cuisine as one of the world’s finest. The secret ingredient—what butter is to classic French gastronomy—is corn oil. (When Nati makes aji de gallina, a rich, velvety chicken stew, a quart of Mazola vanishes into the pot, along with an entire loaf of de-crusted Wonder bread. My sister, a professional chef, says it may be the most delicious thing she has ever eaten.) Justo presented a homemade pumpkin soup, followed by beef cutlets in tomato sauce and bananas flambé. Rain had begun to fall and we dined by candlelight. Justo piled our plates high and appeared with his steaming pot and ladle the moment we finished our first serving, asking, “Más? Más?”

  “Better have seconds, Mark,” John said. “Eat plenty of meat. The last thing you want is to lose weight out there. Makes you weak.”

  John was a lifelong student of fitness, and for someone with such a hearty appetite, he kept himself in amazing shape. When he’d taken his shirt off that afternoon to wash I’d noticed that he had thickly knotted arms and those ropes of muscle around his pelvic bones that you see on Olympic swimmers.

  “When I led trips across Asia and Africa, there’d always be one person who insisted he was a vegetarian,” John said, holding up a forkful of beef. “We’d go to ten different shops to get all the amino acids they need. Then a week later you’d see them sneaking meat. They craved it.”

  “I guess the menu could get a little monotonous in the Sahara, huh?”

  “You’ve probably read about chocolate as a substitute for sex. When we’d get to Morocco some women would see a chocolate shop and make me stop the truck. Remember, we’ve been driving for months. Some of them ate chocolate until they vomited.”

  We stood up from the table Thanksgiving stuffed. It was only seven-thirty, but complete darkness had descended. There really wasn’t anything else to do but go to bed.

  “Um, anything in particular I need to know about camping out in Peru?” I asked, stifling a belch.

  “I’d meant to ask you—when was the last time you slept in a tent?”

  “It’s been a little while,” I admitted. “Maybe even longer than that.”

  Growing up in Illinois, I had skied on slopes with less incline than the one we were camped on. John gave me some pointers about stuffing things under my air mattress when trying to sleep on a hillside. “And roll up your fleece to use as a pillow,” he said. I asked a few awkward questions about where one might relieve oneself without offending our host or his livestock, and we said good night. A few pages of Bingham’s Across South America put me out within minutes.

  About 1 a.m. I awoke with a start, my arms pinned to my sides. I had rolled down into the corner of my tent. I untangled myself and stepped out into the blue light of an impossibly large full moon, bright enough to read by. Flickering around it like luminescent moths were things I hadn’t seen since New York had experienced a power blackout years before—millions and millions of stars.

  TWELVE

  Off on the Wrong Foot

  En Route to Choquequirao

  “It’s important that you know a few things about traveling with mules, Mark.”

  It was about 6:30 A.M. and we were ready to depart. The day had gotten off to a bumpy start. Justo, deputized to wake us at 5:30, instead roused us at 4:15. Things could’ve been worse—when I checked his wristwatch, it was off by three and a half hours. John went through a quick equipment check after breakfast and was shocked to learn that I’d only brought a single water bottle. “That’s all you’ve got for the hike to Choquequirao?” he asked. I offered to run the ten minutes back to Cachora to grab a few extras, but John dismissed the idea as an unnecessary waste of time and money. Juvenal must have guessed what we were talking about, because he walked over to Octavio’s trash bin and plucked out three almost empty bottles of Inca Kola, the neon yellow, bubblegum-sweet soda that is Peru’s national soft drink. John rinsed them out with iodine. These would meet my hydration needs until Machu Picchu. The muleteers didn’t carry any water at all. To them, drinking water was a sign of weakness.

  “Usually we have the right-of-way,” John explained, pointing at one of the mules Mateo and Julián were loading up with Justo’s conga drum–shaped food containers. “But if the mules do get in front, let them go because they’re stupid and they do stupid things. Of course you know not to stand within”—here he spread his arms wide—“of a mule. I saw a kid a few weeks ago with a hole kicked in the side of his head. He’ll probably get better because he’s a kid. I’ve seen adults with dented skulls that are never going to heal.”

  We would need the better part of two days to reach Choquequirao. John said that we were a little less than six miles as the crow flies from the ruins, but we had more than twenty miles of ground to cover on foot. The map I consulted at breakfast made clear that this would be a very long and winding road; the trail zigzagged like it had been blazed with an oscilloscope. And that was just the horizontal part—the easy part.

  “Today, we’ve got about five hundred feet up, then three quarters of a mile down to the river by lunchtime,” John said as we waved good-bye to Octavio. “Then we’ll cross the Apurimac River and start the climb to Choquequirao.” That climb would be another vertical mile up. A Peruvian archaeologist with whom I’d lunched in Cusco, who had spent months working at Choquequirao, couldn’t believe that I planned to walk there voluntarily. “You’ve got to hire a horse, Mark,” he pleaded. “I can make some phone calls. It’s not too late.” Bingham had had a similar experience; at a dinner party the night before his departure from Cusco, a fellow guest told him that the walk had “nearly killed him.”

  John insisted that the hiking would get easier as we went on, because my body would adapt. “There’s a general law in life,” he said. “The body and mind only get stronger when they’re traumatized.”

  It occurred to me, not for the last time, that this was probably not the sort of thing one heard a lot on the Inca Trail.

  We quickly fell into what became our daily rhythm. We hiked for a couple hours, until we’d sweated through our shirts. Mid-morning, we stopped to consume some of the fifteen hundred calories’ worth of snacks that Justo packed for us in brown paper bags each morning (mostly fruit, cookies and candy), then soldiered on until lunch. The muleteers stayed behind to finish packing up camp, then passed us on the trail around snack time. Justo usually led the mule parade, carrying a huge pack and a transistor radio, the tinny Andean tunes making him seem even more like a windup toy. Juvenal and Julián followed in succession. Mateo brought up the rear, yelling, “Moo-lah! Moo-lah! Moo-lah!” (He was saying “mule” in Spanish, but he sounded like the slightly unhinged TV pitchman for a state lottery.) By the time John and I caught up to them, Justo had lunch ready and a table set for two. Each of the four men greeted me differently. Justo called me Señor Mark, or Don Marco, the title “Don” in Peru being roughly equivalent to “Mister” in the old South. Mateo greeted me as Papi, or Pops. Juvenal, who had probably done a thousand of these trips in his life, just called me usted, the formal Spanish version of “you.” Julián hid whenever he saw me.

  Walking downhill was more complicated, and taxing, than I’d imagined. It takes a lot of energy to stop oneself from sliding down a dusty path littered with rocks the size and shape of marbles. I had to plant my foot and cut hard in the opposite direction at each switchback, like a ball carrier trying to slip past the free safety. The altimeter watch I’d purchased indicated that we were dropping a hundred feet with every turn. The dirt changed color as we descended, from brown to black to red. High sierra scrub gave way to dry, subtropical vegetation, dominated by Seussian cacti shaped like gigantic asparagus stalks. We passed ravines like the one Bingham had jumped across, spanned by packed-dirt bridges. Each one had a single wobbly handrail and a bilingual sign that warned NO SE APOYA/DO NOT LEAN. Most of the signs and railings had tumbled down the hillside.

  The Peruvian tourist board has been pushing Choquequirao as “The Other Machu Picchu�
�� for a few years. Part of their strategy is to divert some of the throngs who crowd the more famous ruins. I’d heard reports from a couple of adventure travel snobs that the path to Choquequirao had become “infested” by overflow crowds from Machu Picchu. On our two-day walk to the site, the only other people we saw were a pair of sisters marching to school in their matching uniforms, a farmer heading toward civilization with two mule loads of bananas and coffee beans (and who, recognizing Juvenal, handed him a letter and asked him to post it whenever he got to the next town), and a German guy whose head had been roasted fuchsia by the sun.

  When we sat down for lunch, the temperature was ninety degrees in the shade. I’d guzzled a half gallon of water on the way down. We filled our bottles in the mornings with boiled water, so each warm sip contained doubly unhealthy echoes of plastic and Inca Kola. None of the mule team had drunk a drop, and they all looked queasy. Justo in particular wore the facial expression of a man who’d eaten some bad shellfish, and the others were having a laugh at his expense. John called everyone together and demanded that each man drink a bottle of water into which he mixed an electrolyte powder. The packets looked like something the Red Cross might hand out in Africa; their label said that the elixir had been formulated for babies suffering from cholera.

  Even if my chances of running into anyone I knew on the trail to Choquequirao were pretty low, I was feeling a little self-conscious. Have you ever seen Mr. Travel Guy? He’s the fellow who strides through international airports dressed like he’s flying off to hunt wildebeests—shirt with dozens of pockets, drip-dry pants that zip off into shorts, floppy hat with a cord pulled tight under the chin in case a twister blows through the baggage claim area. All of this describes exactly what I was wearing. Between my microfiber bwana costume and the bags of candy that Justo kept foisting on me, I could have been trick-or-treating as Hemingway. John wore the same set of clothes every single day: a Bolivian park ranger shirt with one button missing; hand-me-down blue Adidas hiking pants that a film producer from Munich had given him years ago; and a pair of Merrell boots that looked like they’d turned up after a sandstorm in the Sahara. No matter the weather, the only flesh he exposed was his face, beneath the wide brim of his bush hat, and the tips of his fingers, which protruded from gloves cut off at the second knuckle.

  My own boots were the only part of my ensemble that I knew wasn’t ridiculous. I’d spent a month picking out the perfect pair for this trip—I e-mailed Adventure’s equipment guru so many times that he finally stopped responding—and walked around in them for two weeks before departing for Cusco. Unfortunately, amid all my research, I hadn’t come across the Wear Two Pairs of Socks Rule. This is evidently one of those dictums like “Don’t Keep a Moody Two-Hundred-Pound Male Chimpanzee in Your Home,” a principle that seems so obvious that no one bothers to mention it until something has gone horribly wrong.

  “You wore one pair of socks on the walk down from Cachora?” John asked, when I mentioned that my feet had begun to hurt. “Well, that’s your problem.”

  When I pulled off my boots at camp late that afternoon, John was flabbergasted. The big toes on each foot were swollen on two sides. The middle toes were rubbed raw. My little toes looked like the sort of meat that ends up in hot dogs. Each had a chickpea-sized blister that, when punctured, squirted like a Super Soaker.

  “These the first blisters of your life, Mark?” John asked as he sterilized a needle with iodine.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Trust me, I’ve had much worse than these.” This was true, though I declined to mention that the cause of my previous torment had been a tight pair of patent leather shoes that I’d worn with a tuxedo to the FiFi Awards—which are, of course, the Oscars of the fragrance industry—several years earlier while working at a men’s fashion magazine.

  For the next two weeks, I wrapped my six aching toes in electrical tape each morning, which gave them the look of piano keys. Then I slathered them with Vaseline and pulled on the only two pairs of thin socks that I’d brought. “You’ll want to splay your feet when walking downhill, to ease the pressure on your toes,” John told me. Now I was Mr. Travel Guy Who Walks Like a Duck.

  Because Bingham has been accused of exaggerating the details of his expeditions, I’d been a little suspicious when I read his description of the climb from the Apurimac to Choquequirao. “At times the trail was so steep that it was easier to go on all fours than to attempt to maintain an erect attitude,” he’d written. That one checked out. “Occasionally we crossed streams in front of waterfalls on slippery logs or treacherous little foot bridges.” Ditto. He recalled having to stop and rest approximately every thirty feet. I would have gladly taken that option had I not been so fixated on keeping up with John’s slow-but-steady pace. During one rest stop, he caught me pressing my fingers against my neck, checking my pulse.

  “What’s your heart rate, Mark?”

  “About . . . one thirty,” I said, subtracting ten beats.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Why? What’s yours?”

  He touched his wrist. “About eighty.”

  Probably the nicest thing I can say about the second day’s walk is that because it was the exact opposite of downhill, my toes were spared further damage. That’s all I can remember because every time I opened my notebook to jot something down, so much sweat dripped off the end of my nose that it blotted out whatever I’d written. (There has been talk of building a cable-car track up the far side of the Apurimac valley, to facilitate tourism at Choquequirao. I wish them the best of luck.) With each view backward, I saw the roaring river shrink farther until it was a slim white ribbon.

  At the top of the ridge, the ground flattened out enough for some enterprising family to have carved out a tiny farm. Here, the mule team stopped to order some chicha, the sour home-brewed corn beer of the Andes. A bowlegged señora waddled out of the house, outfitted in the customary attire of the mountains: stovepipe Stetson, billowing skirt and a hand-made cardigan woven in colors that could stun a deer. She carried a plastic pitcher with a creamy-looking liquid in it. Before anyone could take the first sip, Justo grabbed the vessel and poured out a dribble onto the ground, “for the Pachamama!”—a salute to the Earth Mother.

  I declined Justo’s offer of a swig and showed my respect for the Pachamama by lying down in the dirt and embracing her with every traumatized cell in my body.

  THIRTEEN

  Cradle of Gold

  At Choquequirao

  At the start of the twentieth century, the relatively new science of archaeology had men pondering the ancient wonders that might lie in the earth beneath their feet. No archaeological discovery was more romantic—or more likely to grab the public’s attention—than a lost city. The unearthing of Troy in 1868 and Knossos in 1900 had been inspired by ancient Greek tales. At the moment Bingham staggered into the abandoned citadel of Choquequirao, excavations were under way at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza and in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings that were expected to reveal some of the greatest treasures of antiquity. A frontpage story published in The New York Times in January 1911, six months before Bingham arrived at Machu Picchu, reflects the mania for vanished civilizations: GERMAN DISCOVERS ATLANTIS IN AFRICA.

  The few explorers who had the fortitude to reach Choquequirao during the nineteenth century were driven less by dreams of finding what had come to be known as the Lost City of the Incas than they were by a desire to cash in on a potential mountaintop El Dorado—the legendary city of gold that the conquistadors had sought in vain. The Frenchman Léonce Angrand described hearing that “immense treasures were buried among the ruins when the last survivors of the race of the sun retired to this savage asylum.” J.J. Nuñez, the prefect who had pleaded with Bingham to visit the site, was hunting the treasure assumed to be hiding in the “cradle of gold,” buried beneath the vegetation high above the Apurimac River. The idea that ancient ruins constituted part of Peru’s proud patrimonio, or heritage, was still a few years o
ff. When Bingham arrived, Nuñez’s men were setting off dynamite charges, blasting Inca buildings in search of hidden Inca loot.

  One of Bingham’s great strengths as a historian was compiling evidence. At Choquequirao he closely followed the protocol laid out in the Royal Geographical Society’s handbook Hints to Travellers, which served as a sort of Exploring for Dummies for two generations of novice globe-trotters. (“In one of the chapters I found out what should be done when one is confronted by a prehistoric site,” Bingham wrote. “Take careful measurements and plenty of photographs and describe as accurately as possible all finds.”) His four busy days on the hillside above the Apurimac were a dress rehearsal for the discoveries he would make at Machu Picchu two years later. Bingham was also honing his skills as a selfpromoter. Within days of his departure from Choquequirao, a short notice appeared in The New York Tribune: “Professor Hiram Bingham, of Yale University, who is in Southern Peru on a trip of historical research, writes that he has made discoveries of Inca remains near Abancay of the greatest importance.”

  What Bingham couldn’t have known at the time he arrived was how much Choquequirao resembles Machu Picchu. Like its cousin, Choquequirao is built on a ridge far above a sacred river, with extraordinary mountain views in almost all directions. It was situated to look out onto three skyscraping peaks—important apus, or mountain gods, in Inca cosmology—much like the sacred summits visible from Machu Picchu. Both sites have distinct upper and lower levels, were built around a central plaza and were designed with an elevated viewing platform at one end. Both are surrounded by stone-walled terraces that served as places to plant crops and as engineering supports to buttress a precarious building site. Neither one was, or is, especially easy to get to. And each seems to fuse almost seamlessly with its rocky location, hammered onto its mountaintop like a crown on a cracked molar.