by Jim Rogers
And here stood one of their cities, Tiahuanaco. A succession of rulers had had the vision to plan and build this colossal city, this monument to man’s genius.
In 1911, Hiram Bingham, an American explorer searching for the Lost City of the Incas, was led along the same route into the Andes used by the Inca chief Manco in eluding the Spanish conquistador Pizarro.
After a strenuous climb to seven thousand feet, he was taken by his guide to a great flight of beautifully constructed stone-faced terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high. Bingham had seen similar flights before, and he was unexcited.
“Suddenly,” he later recalled, “I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework. It was hard to see them for they were partly covered with trees and moss, the growth of centuries, but in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, appeared here and there walls of white granite ashlars [square-hewn stones] carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together.”
Following on, he found a semicircular building “whose outer wall followed the natural curvature of the rock and was keyed to it by one of the finest examples of masonry I had ever seen. Furthermore, it was tied into another beautiful wall, made of very carefully matched ashlars of pure white granite, especially selected for its fine grain. Clearly, it was the work of a master artist.”
He continued to hack away jungle and to explore. “Dimly, I began to realize that this wall and its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world.… It fairly took my breath away. What could this place be?”
Bingham had been led to Machu Picchu, which because of its emerald-like mountain setting is arguably the most famous and spectacular archaeological site in the Americas. Certainly today it is the most visited site in South America. Since farmers were living and farming there when he arrived, it is hard to say that he “discovered” Machu Picchu. The correct way to phrase it, we were told, was that his was a “scientific discovery.”
We rode in by train along the silvery Urubamba, legendary river of the sun. The mountains rising around us were a deep, deep green, their tops shrouded in evermoving mists.
The ancient city, perched on a steep green slope, is still largely intact, as only the original peaked thatch roofs have disappeared. The city straddles the narrow saddle of a mountain high above a U-bend of the Urubamba. A backdrop of snowcapped peaks rise to eighteen thousand feet. The sight that greeted us as we passed through the portals of Intipunku was magical. What an incredible place this must once have been!
The Tower of the Sun was built over the royal mausoleum with such perfect precision that no mortar was required. The Spanish found this stonework without mortar throughout the Americas but could never duplicate it.
The Temple of Three Windows opened onto the glory of the Andes. The city was the terminus of a 625-mile road through the mountains, which like all Inca roads had been paved and had post houses at intervals. I was agog at all this, also built by men without horses, the wheel, or metal. We think of Stone Age man as benighted and primitive, but here as in many other places, he had erected an elaborate civilization, obviously employing hierarchical social structures, elaborate planning, and sophisticated technical know-how.
For those with a little nerve there was the pièce de résistance—climbing up the hair-raising stone steps to the top of Huayna Picchu, which overlooked the fabled city. At its summit stood the Temple of the Moon.
Since Hiram Bingham’s day a tremendous amount of clearing and restoration had been done, which included thatching some of the buildings and setting the original watercourses to work again. It was a romantic, otherworldly site—a place for dreaming.
Much like Pachacamac and other less important temples in the Inca empire, Machu Picchu had been home to priests, high functionaries, craftsmen, and servants, and most important, to the mamacunas, the virgins chosen to dedicate their lives to the sun god. It seemed to have been a city without poor, a mountain fortress of liturgical fountains and glorious walkways.
No one knew what had happened to these people. The Incas had left no written record, and the Spanish chronicles didn’t mention the city. They might have been killed by an epidemic, or the occupants might have been swept away by the bloody political disputes raging throughout the Inca empire before and after its fall.
Here at Machu Picchu excavations only added to the mystery of what had happened to its inhabitants. In all, the skeletons of 173 people were found; 150 were women, many buried with valuables, which led to the conclusion that Machu Picchu was a sanctuary of the Virgins of the Sun to protect them from the conquistadors’ lust. At the tomb of the high priestess, as Bingham called it, the remains of a woman and a small dog were found, along with some ceramic objects, two broaches, and woolen clothing. The woman had suffered from syphilis.
At Cuzco, we dined on guinea pig, a local delicacy, which tasted like good crisp pork barbecue. We ate the head and all. The local chicha, or corn moonshine, was horrible, like wine that had gone bad and then rotted.
The main painting of the Last Supper in the local cathedral showed guinea pig being served as well as local cheeses and green peppers stuffed with meat. An Andean artist three hundred years ago would naturally have assumed that was what was served at the Last Supper.
The border crossing from Peru to Ecuador was unique. The Pan-American suddenly turned into a mass of people milling about countless stalls, a bazaar, all as crowded as those in China. As we inched our way through the mob, I wondered what was going on, where the border guards were. Six or eight guys suddenly rushed at us, yelling and gesturing. They said we had to stop, as we had driven right by the border post. They turned out to be money changers. The government employees didn’t pay much attention to who came and went here, but the money changers weren’t about to miss a pair of potential customers. I was worried that we would be searched at the post, but getting through turned out to be a breeze.
On the other side of the border we found scores of money changers on chairs by the road, each with a calculator and a briefcase on his lap. I went from one to the other, checking the rate. It was like shopping for a stock on NASDAQ, as this was a competitive, liquid market. They all had basically the same rate. I couldn’t figure out how they made a living, as this border, due to all the problems to the south, wasn’t busy with travelers.
For the past two thousand miles we had been traveling on the Pan-American Highway through desert. After crossing the river into Ecuador, however, the landscape dramatically changed into lush rain forest. Spanish moss grew on phone lines, along with what I took to be air plants. Although the road was not bad, driving was difficult as there were no signs on the roads or in the towns. Not only did we feel constantly lost, but a couple of times we entered a major traffic circle and came out the other side, only to discover we were headed the wrong way on a one-way street.
Ecuador was prosperous, with much more traffic and economic activity than in Peru. We were in the south, the least prosperous portion of the country; the northeast was where oil had been found.
I’d seen an efficient free-market money system, and now I saw prosperity and great roads, along with lots of trucks, cars, and buses. That the border was so easy meant the country was open and fluid. If I could find a stock exchange, I decided I’d look into investing here.
Along this part of the route, the Pan-Am was a continuous fiesta, open day and night.
Shops on both roadsides displayed bananas, pineapples, oranges, lemons, limes, guavas, tomatoes—every kind of fruit and vegetable. Whole pigs hung in front of restaurants, few of which had more than fifteen tables. We could pick out our pork chop, which we’d have along with a salad, beans, rice, and a beer, and they’d grill it on the spot. Other stalls sold clothes, shoes, plumbing items, whatever was needed for daily life.
We drove into Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, on a good road over great bridges. The to
wn had a glittering skyline. We found the best hotel, parked our motorcycles, and set out to find how to get to the Galápagos, which we knew were restricted for conservation reasons.
We were able to arrange a flight. From the island’s airport we boarded a boat called the Daphne for five days of exploration.
With all the wildlife here—seals, turtles, lizards, and birds—it was easy to see why Darwin had found these islands a natural laboratory for evolution. As an example, a certain starling, all its numbers come from one great-granddaddy starling, had evolved differently on two separate islands, giving Darwin a clear vision of evolution.
On one of the shorelines, we stumbled onto a seal who had just given birth. Her blood was drying on the rock on which she lay. She was completely exhausted, but her new baby was bouncing around beside her. All about us turtles, seals, and birds were mating or giving birth. Baby somethings were everywhere. This was certainly a fecund place.
Darwin’s days were long gone. As recently as thirty years before, the Galápagos might still have been a laboratory of evolution; now, with all of us traipsing around, it was over. Tourists were everywhere, ninety thousand a year, along with twelve thousand inhabitants recently arrived to service the visitors. Some of the nearby ocean fish had turned poisonous from eating garbage and sewage tossed overboard by the boats transporting tourists.
Goats had been here for generations; they were tame when introduced but had long since become wild. Now they were being killed to restore some centuries-old balance that the environmental authorities believed in. Not only was this a travesty in itself, but it was all the more appalling since some of the goats had evolved so that they could thrive on salt water.
The locals had used some of the money brought in by tourism to build a pathetic football stadium. So much for nature.
In Guayaquil we stayed in the town’s best hotel, the Oro Verde, or “green gold,” so named after the country’s chief export, bananas, which accounted for 25 percent of its foreign-exchange earnings.
Banana trees were so plentiful here that we frequently had to brush their leaves and branches out of our path. It was easy to see how Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Honduras, Panama, and Guatemala had gotten the name “banana republics.”
Together these countries accounted for three quarters of the world’s exports of bananas, half of which went to Europe, 2.7 million tons of green gold a year. Apparently the Germans and Belgians were their best customers, their purchases having tripled during the eighties.
I continued to have a good feeling about Ecuador. The currency was convertible, the country prosperous. Following my usual custom, after several attempts to find someone who understood what I wanted, I went to the largest local bank that was a member of the stock exchange and had a branch in the United States.
I am not sexist, but every Latin American country is macho. I was immediately encouraged because everybody in the bank’s stock department was a woman. If these jobs were so unimportant that they were filled by women, it meant the stock market was still on the ground floor. It meant I was in time.
I asked to see the head person, and to my joy another woman came out. Here I was in a black leather jacket and chaps, wanting to buy stocks. The chief, Irene Inez, immediately figured me for a drug runner. Luckily a friend of mine from the investment world had coincidentally connected with us in Guayaquil and happened to bring along John Train’s book, The New Money Masters, the first chapter of which is about my investment methods. It took an entire day, but this book and a couple of faxed magazine articles convinced Señora Inez I was legit; otherwise she’d still be checking to see if I was a drug peddler. She took pictures of my passport, and I signed my name a thousand times. I began to consider myself lucky she didn’t fingerprint me—all so I could give her my money.
Finally we opened an account. “When you arrive in Quito, the capital,” Señora Inez said, “go by our legal department to sign some more forms.”
I wrote her a dollar check and gave her instructions on what I wanted to buy, my usual mix, seven of the bluest chips on this very depressed exchange, such companies as a bank, a newspaper, and a brewery.
No problem, she told me.
In Quito I called the bank’s legal department, but the lawyer didn’t return my calls. I went by to see him twice, but both times he wasn’t there. Figuring that seeing him was a formality, I let it go. After we looked around the city, we made our way north.
To jump ahead, long after I returned to New York, all I had for my dollar investment was a canceled check. I repeatedly wrote Señora Inez in Guayaquil asking for confirmation slips, records, an account statement, something.
After seven or eight months of this I wrote the ambassador in New York. He called the head of this department at the bank, and I finally received a letter from her.
“Señor Rogers,” Señora Inez wrote, “it is not legal for foreigners to own shares in our country, so I will send you your money back. You must understand that the rate of exchange of our currency has gone down a bit since you deposited money here. You probably will not receive the entire amount you left.”
I was beside myself. I had spent an entire day confirming this very point, the first one I make sure of when I invest in a country. Now I was glad one of my rules about these investments was to start small, so when problems like this cropped up, they were small problems. Another rule was that the foreign banks I dealt with have a branch in the States. First, if you want to straighten something out, it is easier if they are here, and second, they are a lot easier to sue if you have to—which I haven’t.
Naturally, its United States branch was in Miami, which today is a South American money center. Americans in the Northeast think everything of consequence must be in New York, but to many people from Latin America the United States is Miami—it’s Spanish-speaking, it’s all they know of the States, and it’s all they want to know. From their point of view it’s a Latin American Hong Kong, Singapore, or Bangkok, an international city hospitable to their business.
So, I called up the Miami branch, got a Colombian who worked for them, and wanted to know what was going on, if he could help me.
“If the bank is only now telling me this is illegal,” I said, holding my outrage in check, “then I shouldn’t get my money back at a depreciated rate, because you took the money with a promise to buy me shares. I don’t mind taking the currency risk in the stock market, but the bank shouldn’t come back now, nine months later, and say, ‘Hey, it wasn’t legal in the first place.’ ”
“I don’t understand this,” said Señor Lopez. “I’m a foreigner. I own Ecuadorean shares.”
“You own shares?”
“Yes. This sounds like a runaround. I’ll see what I can do.”
Letters passed back and forth, each exchange taking a month or so. At last my new friend in Miami told me, “We’ve got it taken care of. You can own shares if you sign certain papers. The legal department is going to translate the proper documents into English.”
“Send them in Spanish,” I said, knowing that translating them would take another two months.
Finally, I got the documents, in both Spanish and English. The cover letter told me to go to the Ecuadorean embassy in New York and have it certify my signature. It’s no wonder there weren’t more foreign investors in Ecuador if they each had to go through all this, but at least for once something in this mess was straightforward and clear.
At the embassy I gave the papers to the document consul, who asked what I was buying.
“Shares,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I can’t sign that.”
“Miss, please, just read the letter.”
“No, I’m not going to read the letter. This isn’t how these things are done. You have to obtain …” She rattled off a jumble of what sounded like intricate procedures.
“Wait a minute, Miss,” I said, my exasperation rising. “Please, just read the letter. It’s from the largest bank in Ecuador. It’s written
by their legal department, and they say I’m supposed to bring it here to you.”
“They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Bureaucracy! I insisted on seeing the ambassador, or whatever the head guy was called here in New York.
Consul-General Ramos came out, listened to me, and murmured to the document clerk, but she was adamant. She wasn’t going to do anything.
Señor Ramos started in on me, too, telling me all the steps I had to take, repeating her refusals.
“Would you simply read this?” I asked.
He glanced at it and began to shake his head, no.
“Look,” I said, my voice rising in frustration, “I’m trying to invest money in your country. Why are you making this difficult? The legal department in the largest bank in your country says it’s okay, I say it’s okay—I want to give your country money, and all I’ve gotten is a huge runaround.”
He kept shaking his head, and I was growing dizzy with disbelief.
What century were these guys living in? I said I wanted to go over his head, to talk to his boss. Well, in the entire northern hemisphere there was nobody over his head; he was the boss.
Señor Ramos and I went back and forth a while longer, and finally something clicked with him. He had been thinking I was there to buy Ecuadorean alpaca or wool or some other cash crop, and that I needed contracts that had been approved by a million different departments back home. Obviously nobody had ever been in here to buy shares before, a fact that usually lights me up but that right then did not seem such an advantage. I’m almost always too early in these things. Maybe this was like Nepal, where I’d had the God-given sense to recognize that the country was too primitive and too much at risk of social disturbance to invest in and stayed out on my original trip there.
“Come back in three hours,” he said, “and we’ll have something typed up and you can sign it.”
He gave me a beatific smile. All this for a signature guarantee.