Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  The impetus behind Scott’s charge—and much of the exploration happening around the globe—was a muttonchopped septuagenarian living in London. Sir Clements Markham was the former president of the Royal Geographical Society. Coincidentally, he was also the English-speaking world’s reigning expert on the history of the Incas. In 1910, he published The Incas of Peru, a new chronicle of the Spanish Conquest. Incas was the first major work to examine the years following the puppet king Manco’s escape from Cusco, and it had a huge impact on Bingham’s thinking. So did Markham’s translations of newly discovered sixteenth-century works by a Dominican friar and a Spanish army officer. Both writers had traveled to a secluded Inca settlement called Vilcabamba. Bingham had singled out Vilcabamba as the true Lost City of the Incas, where Manco had established his rebel capital. Buried within Markham’s translations were hints to Vilcabamba’s location.

  Then a new clue surfaced, one that initially seemed to confuse matters. A researcher at the national library in Lima, combing through an account left behind by another Spanish friar, had come across a passage that indicated that Manco had fled to a different city. In this version, the Inca capital was called Vitcos.

  In the spring and summer of 1910, as Bingham sat in New Haven sifting through the evidence about Vilcabamba (or was it Vitcos?), the newly self-described explorer would have found it almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading about one expedition or another. Cook and Peary were feuding publicly over who had reached the North Pole first. Norway’s Amundsen sent England’s Scott a telegram announcing that he planned to beat him to the South Pole. And a group of amateur “sourdoughs” shocked the mountaineering world with their claim to have climbed the north summit of Mount McKinley, fueled by doughnuts and hot chocolate.

  The world seemed to be running out of potential discoveries. The writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who was drafting a novel about four explorers in deepest South America—a book soon to become the adventure classic The Lost World—teased Robert Peary at a London luncheon held to honor the polar pioneer. “There had been a time when the world was full of blank spaces,” he told the attendees. “But owing to the ill-directed energy of [our] guest and other gentlemen of similar tendencies these spaces [are] being rapidly filled up.”

  Around this time, Bingham received a copy of the historian Adolph Bandelier’s The Islands of Titicaca and Koati to review. Buried in a footnote was the interesting fact that Mount Coropuna in southern Peru, estimated to top out at twenty-three thousand feet, “is likely (unless some higher peak be found yet in northern Peru) . . . the culminating point of the continent.” In other words, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere—which had never been climbed—was probably in Peru, not far from where any search for Vilcabamba would take place. Bingham was intrigued by the opportunity “to enjoy the satisfaction, which all Alpinists feel, of conquering a ‘virgin peak.’” He surely had more than personal gratification in mind. When he arrived in Lima for the first time in 1909, the city was still buzzing about the achievements of Annie S. Peck. This American mountaineer had just received a gold medal from Peru’s President Augusto Leguia (and barrels of newspaper ink in the United States) for the achievement of climbing Mount Huascaran, which she claimed was the highest peak in the hemisphere. Peck had recently conceded that perhaps Coropuna held that honor, and she was planning a high-profile assault on the mountain in 1911.

  When a former Yale classmate expressed interest in funding the first topographical survey of Peru’s seventy-third meridian (a latitudinal line that circles the globe near Machu Picchu and also happens to pass within a few miles of New Haven), Bingham sketched out an audacious plan. The official prospectus written up by the soon-to-be director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 made clear that Bingham’s primary objective was to earn immortality as an explorer, one way or another. In the span of about six months, he would sail to Peru, search for Vilcabamba (or maybe Vitcos—he’d sort that out when he got to Peru), summit Mount Coropuna (with any luck, Annie Peck would fail in her attempt), oversee the seventy-third meridian survey and measure the depth of the remote Lake Parinacochas. This last objective seems to have been an attempt to curry favor with Sir Clements Markham, whom Bingham pestered frequently for advice through the early part of 1911. Then he’d sail back to New York. He budgeted that he’d need six men and about $12,000.

  Bingham scrambled to cover his trip expenses. As a matter of pride, he hoped not to have to dip into Alfreda’s savings as he had for prior excursions. In the end, he sold four prospective magazine articles about the voyage to Harper’s and put up for sale a plot ofland in Honolulu that his father, recently deceased, had promised to his church. In the timeless tradition of explorers everywhere, he reached out to every potential corporate sponsor he could think of—obtaining photographic equipment from George Eastman of Eastman Kodak and securing a discount on gear from Ezra Fitch of Abercrombie and Fitch. When time ran short, he asked Alfreda for money to hire a team doctor.

  By late spring, Bingham had assembled his team. The Yale Peruvian Expedition would depart as soon as spring classes ended.

  EIGHTEEN

  Far Out

  Yanama, Peru

  “Here, Mark, take a pinch of this,” John said. He pulled out a Baggie of coca and invited me to grab a wad. “Chew it until it’s almost a mush, then stick it between H your cheek and gum.”

  I hadn’t tried anything like this since my hero Carlton Fisk suggested during NBC’s Game of the Week that kids like me ought to sample a tin of Copenhagen chewing tobacco. Chewing coca, I was delighted to learn, had almost nothing in common with dipping snuff. Instead of tasting like a Marlboro unraveled in your mouth, it had the flavor of green tea with a hint of bay leaf. Unlike my vertigo-inducing initiation into the nicotine club, I felt no head rush the first time I sampled coca. I didn’t feel anything at all. And there was no spitting.

  It would be no exaggeration to say that the Andes have, for thousands of years, run on coca. When the Spaniards arrived, only the Inca royalty were allowed to chew this sacred plant, which acts as a mild narcotic—suppressing hunger, boosting energy, and alleviating the effects of soroche. Although very illegal in the United States, coca leaves have about the same relationship to cocaine that Sudafed cold tablets have to crystal meth. Each member of our team happily received his ration every morning, and the few strangers we encountered along the way, once we left Choquequirao, invariably tried to beg a pinch off the muleteers. Twice I saw Juvenal holding a fan of three coca leaves before his lips, as if making an offering to the apus. I was too intimidated to ask what he was doing.

  Bingham was not a huge fan of coca. “The Indians of the highlands have now for so many generations been neglected by their rulers and brutalized by being allowed to drink all the alcohol they can purchase and to assimilate all the cocaine they can secure, through the constant chewing of coca leaves, that they have lost much if not all of their racial self-respect,” he wrote.

  Our next destination was Yanama, the only speck of civilization on the four-day walk between Choquequirao and Juvenal’s hometown of Huancacalle. The route we were following was genuine Inca-built trail, laid down half a millennium ago. The smooth roadwork, intended to bear the soft feet of humans and llamas, had been ground to bits by mules and iron-shod horses. For mile after mile, baseball-sized rocks littered the path, each step reminding me of my tender toes. Every time we crested a ridge, another canyon lay before us. To an observer from above we would have looked like a small army of ants marching across the world’s largest salad bar, one gigantic bowl at a time.

  John approached the act of walking like a craftsman. “Every step, every second, I’m thinking, concentrating,” he told me. “I remember every trail I’ve ever been on. I can remember where I made wee stops in India in 1987.” Occasionally, he’d bark out a bit of advice over his shoulder. “You’ll want to stay as close to the edge as you can, Mark, to catch the breezes from below on the updraft. Just watch your foo
ting.”

  I was not concentrating especially hard. As I walked hour after hour with little to focus on but John’s dusty boots in front of me and a deep chasm off to one side, random thoughts and buried memories began to percolate into my brain. Does Juvenal dislike me? I don’t think he’s called me by name once in the entire week we’ve been out here.... Remember that time in first grade when you forgot your lunch? And Sister Teresa took you over to the convent where all those super-old nuns dressed like penguins ate roast beef and made you drink a mug of Sanka with Sweet’n Low because it was so cold out? . . . Oh, we’ll all have chicken and dumplings/ When she comes.... What could John be hiding under that hat? Is he bald? Does he have one of those Gorbachev wine stains? . . . Whatever happened to that long-legged girl in your Victorian poetry class who invited you over to make fondue and watch The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Didn’t you stay out until 4 A.M. the night before and cancel on her because you were so hungover? It never occurred to you until this very moment, in the middle of the goddamned Andes, that she might have had more in mind than bread and cheese, did it?

  The path narrowed around a rock ledge to just two feet wide, and I held my breath and forced myself to focus for the sixty seconds I needed to pass through it. Curiosity got the best of me midway. I tensed every muscle in the lower half of my body and tilted my neck for a peek into the abyss. A wall of sand-colored rock dropped straight down. There seemed to be no bottom.

  When we reached the far side, John looked back and said, with some disappointment, “I think they’ve widened it. Someone must’ve lost a mule and complained.”

  As the day grew hotter, the distant rumbles of rock slides punctuated the quiet. At a spot where stones spilled across the trail, John paused to listen for any further avalanches on the way. “It’s not so bad up high where we are, but down there,” he said, nodding into the chasm to our left, “the rocks will be coming at a hundred miles an hour or more. Once you hear them it’s too late to react.” The sun was blinding. Every surface was coated with flecks of mica, which gave the impression that some crazed fairy had tossed glitter over the entire valley.

  We were headed toward the ruins of Vitcos. I was especially excited about this because Vitcos happened to sit in a crucial location—near a hostel owned and run by Juvenal’s family. This meant a bed for three nights. The muleteers were excited, too—the stop meant two days off from the trail. John was excited—by his standards, anyway—because to get to Vitcos we would have to hike through some serious Inca country.

  “There are fewer people walking this route now than there were fifteen years ago, and there weren’t many then, either,” he said. Less than fifty miles to the east, a couple thousand people were walking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

  “It’s usually just the hard-core types you see out here?” I asked.

  “Oh, I doubt we’ll see anyone on the trail until we get to Juvenal’s house”—two days away. The last foreigners we’d seen were a French couple who shadowed us for a few hours on the hike out of Choquequirao: they wore matching eyeglasses with nickel-sized lenses and hiked with a walking pole in each hand, as if working out on his-andhers NordicTracks. Our last sight of them they were setting up camp by what looked to be a charming riverbank. “They’ll change their minds when the bugs come out,” John said, with a final glance back.

  The town of Yanama consisted of a one-room school, a shop selling rice and Inca Kola, and a few small houses. We camped at a farm by the side of a stream. After two straight days of walking until my clothes were drenched with sweat, then passing through clouds of dust and mica flakes, drying off in the hot sun during lunch and repeating the entire process in the afternoon, both I and my Travel Guy attire had crusted over. I stripped down to a pair of shorts, a bit of immodesty that made the señora of the house shriek “Ay!” and hide her face behind the brim of her hat when she saw me. Her two boys, ages eight and nine, watched me from the hillside.

  At the bottom of the hill, a hand pump drew water from the river, and I chatted with Mateo while he hurriedly filled a bucket for cooking. The late afternoon sun warmed my bare back. Mateo was a laconic and sociable fellow—he chuckled when he pointed to my ankles, which had two-inch stripes of dirt like Samoan warrior tattoos—so I was surprised that he seemed to be agitated about something he called “poo-moo-blah-blah-blah” (at least that’s what it sounded like) and bolted up the hill the moment his bucket was full. Of all the times he could have chosen not to shake my hand repeatedly, I wondered, why did it have to be when I was carrying a bar of soap?

  A friend who had gone off to work in the Peace Corps in the Amazon basin once wrote me a letter that began: “At a certain point, you resign yourself to the fact that there are at least three bugs on you at any time, and that one of them is going to bite you.” I had noticed, both in Cusco and at Choquequirao, that many of the travelers I met had constellations of welts on their lower legs. How was it possible to get bitten so many times on one spot? I wondered. Had they never heard of insect repellent? Or slapping? Was this some variety of hives, an allergic reaction to too much cooking oil? I began lathering my hands in the frigid water, and the answer came to me almost immediately.

  First, I felt a couple of painful pinches around my ankles. Then a few more on my hands, and back, and neck. In the span of perhaps five seconds, I was completely swarmed by a fog of tiny, black biting insects the size of pinheads. I was bitten in places I hadn’t imagined bugs knew existed: they got me inside my ears, on the palms of my hands, in crevices where the sun hadn’t shined since Nixon was president. I swatted at myself like I was on fire, rinsed off what soap and bugs I could under cold water and ran up the hill to my tent, passing Mateo en route. “Poo-moo-blah-blah-blah!” he yelled after me, raising one water bucket in salute. In my tent I started to survey the damage but gave up after counting sixty bites. Each welt was like a little bull’s-eye, with a red circle surrounding a white one and a black dot in the middle.

  After several minutes of fruitless scratching, I got dressed and walked to the cook tent. Juvenal was sitting outside the flap with the two boys, quizzing them about something in Quechua. In his yellow Polo button-down shirt, V-neck sweater and striped wool pants, he could’ve been someone’s grandpa who’d just spent twenty minutes finding the perfect parking spot for his Buick, except that the town of Yanama had never seen a motorized vehicle.

  He saw me scratching the backs of my hands and motioned for me to come over so he could have a look. “Puma wakachi,” he said, pointing to his tear duct. “The bug that makes the puma cry. Put cold water on them.” Then he turned back to the boys to finish his lesson.

  Quechua kids are famously adorable, because they have coal-black eyes and perpetually rosy cheeks, and these two were no exception. The boys didn’t have much to do. Their teacher, who taught all the children in the area, had gone off for the week to a festival up the valley somewhere. Fortuitously, a promising source of entertainment had wandered into their yard—me. After about an hour of stalking me from a distance as I laid out my laundry to dry in the waning sunlight and clawed at my ankles, the older boy screwed up the courage to ask a question.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “I’m from New York.”

  I might as well have said I was from the planet Zebulon.

  “Have you heard of New York?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you heard of the United States?”

  “No.” His brother shook his head dubiously in support.

  “Have you heard of Machu Picchu?”

  “Yes, of course.” Big smiles.

  “Well, I live north of Machu Picchu.”

  This seemed to satisfy them. Then the younger one thought of another question.

  “Is it true that Michael Jackson is dead?”

  I tried, and failed, to come up with the Spanish words to say, “The King of Pop will live forever in our hearts.” So I just nodded yes and tried to look sad.

  A
t dinnertime I ducked into the cook tent and showed my bug bites to John.

  “Ah, I figured they’d get you sooner or later. I know you won’t let it happen again.”

  As we sat down for dinner, the boys squatted about twenty feet from the open tent flap, watching us as they would a particularly engrossing cartoon. I wondered what my sons, whose daily schedules were so regimented, would do if I moved them to a place like this. Probably report me to child services. I asked John what it had been like to grow up in Western Australia in the fifties and sixties.

  “Australia was a pretty austere place after the war, up until the mid-sixties. Every Sunday night for a treat we had beans on toast. I was one of the last generation that could live in a big town like Perth, on an acre of land, and walk to school through the bush, with the birds and snakes. I could go and pick fruit, build cubby houses.”

  “Sounds like studying might not have been your first priority.”

  “I didn’t like school. The educational system was flawed. They didn’t teach you how to live.” John had been a sickly child. In his early teens, he suffered from hay fever and asthma so severe that in order to breathe he had to get up every night around one o’clock to take ephedrine. His eczema was so bad that his mother wrapped his limbs in cloths before bed so he wouldn’t tear into his skin. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night stuck to the sheets from blood,” John said.

  One night John took a walk around the house after his ephedrine dose and noticed that he felt better than usual. “The next night I took less medicine and went for a walk outside. Then I tried a little jogging with the walking. Eventually, after several weeks, I found that after twenty minutes of sweaty exercise, the asthma would be gone.” Almost everything that John had learned in life since, he’d picked up on his own. He’d walked out of the only Spanish class he’d ever taken, years ago—“we kept talking about pillows—how’s that supposed to help me get through customs?”—and then practiced the language by talking to people and translating the newspaper. When I used a word that he liked, he wrote it down in his blue notebook.