Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  I was contemplating Bingham’s complaint that he had to hear someone play “Tonquinoise” on the piano every time he set foot in a new hacienda, when a song came on that I couldn’t remember ever having heard before, though it was so awful that I may have simply repressed the memory. It sounded as if Leonid Brezhnev had holed up in the Kremlin with a Casio keyboard and the cast from a junior-college production of Les Misérables. John, who had up to this point shown zero interest in any genre of music, sang along with gusto and pounded the back of Edgar’s headrest: “Moscow, Moscow, drinking vodka all night long/Keeps you happy, makes you strong/A ha ha ha ha ha!”

  “My God, what is this?” I asked John.

  “Theme from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Very big in Australia. You probably don’t know it because of the boycott.”

  I made a mental note to send Jimmy Carter a thank-you card.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Waiting

  Near Santa Teresa

  We spent a night in Quillabamba, a small city with some features that struck me as overwhelmingly cosmopolitan after two weeks in the backcountry: two-way traffic, restaurants, couples holding hands. Juvenal unfolded himself from the back of the truck, grasped my hand, said, “Good luck, Marco,” and walked off into the sunset to catch a bus home to Huancacalle, leaving me to wonder if he’d known my name all along. The only memorable moment of our urban respite occurred when a pharmacist with whom I’d been conversing in Spanish made my year by asking whether I was visiting from Madrid. Because I’d learned to speak Castellano in Spain, I had a habit of pronouncing soft C’s with a European lisp that the muleteers found hilarious—a hypothetical order for five beers would come out of my mouth as “theenk-o ther-vay-thas.”

  Not long ago, it had been possible to catch the train to Machu Picchu from our next stop, Santa Teresa. Or rather, from what used to be Santa Teresa. The original town was swept away during the El Niño climate craziness of 1998, by a mud slide caused when a chunk of glacial ice cracked off the side of a nearby mountain. A wave of earth and rocks roared down the valley, wiping out an entire train line, burying a power plant and killing at least twenty-two people. When Edgar pulled over on the highway for a relief stop, we looked down into a riverbed where a gentle current flowed over twisted iron rails and smashed train cars.

  There are three ways to reach Machu Picchu, two of which are well known—taking the train from Cusco and hiking the Inca Trail. We were stopping in Santa Teresa to check on the train schedules for the “back door” route to Machu Picchu,7 a small train shuttle that runs once a day from a hydroelectric plant on the Urubamba River. We’d then spend a day climbing to Llactapata, which has been called the Lost Suburb of the Incas because of its proximity to Machu Picchu. Bingham had found Llactapata during his follow-up Peruvian expedition in 1912. Like a surprising number of his discoveries, it had fallen out of sight for decades—in spite of the fact that it sits just three miles from Machu Picchu and, when cleared of brush, is plainly visible from the more famous site. John had been a member of the team that conducted the first major scientific investigation of Llactapata, in 2003, much of which was based on old coordinates that the explorer Hugh Thomson had found among Bingham’s dusty papers at Yale. John therefore had a proprietary interest. “There’s some fantastic stuff up there,” he told me as we did some last-minute shopping in Santa Teresa. “They’re just beginning to understand how closely related it was to Machu Picchu.”

  We drove on through a dry valley to a small cluster of huts at the bottom of a steep slope. John knew some porters we could hire to carry our packs up to a campsite near the top, next to Llactapata. We’d spend a day looking around and then descend to the Hidroeléctrica train station. The afternoon ride to Machu Picchu lasted about forty-five minutes. I’d be wearing clean underwear and sipping a pisco sour by sundown.

  Unfortunately, there was no way of contacting these porters in advance. Spring planting season was approaching, and all the men were off helping burn the nearby hillsides. The entire valley resembled one of those segments on the evening news in which Highway One is shut down near Los Angeles because of wildfires. Every hour or so, John would wander up the road to see if any of his strong-backed buddies had returned home. Each time he came back alone.

  We set up lunch in a school yard next to a tiny general store. It was a hot, sunny day, and when I was certain John had gone to check on porters again, I splurged on a bottle of cold water for myself and Inca Kolas for Justo and Edgar. The gearbox on the Land Cruiser was making odd noises, so Edgar went off to examine the underside of the chassis.

  “I used to do that with Encounter Overland,” John said approvingly when he saw Edgar flat on his back beneath the truck. “Sometimes it’s good for the driver to just get under the vehicle and have a good hard look around, study the patterns until the problem pops out at you.” Edgar had taken this intuitive method of auto repair to another level by closing his eyes and folding his hands over his chest.

  After a long day of near-complete idleness, we officially postponed Operation Storm Llactapata in the late afternoon. Justo and I parked our folding table in the valley’s one shady spot, sipped hot tea and tried not to catch each other’s eye. Even he was talked out. The only books I had with me were Bingham’s, and I’d read them all twice. Not for the first time, I thought about how I’d give a hundred dollars for any one of the four copies of Great Expectations buried somewhere in my attic. We all watched some kids play soccer on a dirt field. When the game ended, John headed off again to look for his porter friend Fructoso, whose wife had invited him to come by and wait for her husband. “You should stop by, Mark, they’re fantastic people.” I lied and said I had some postcards to write.

  Two boys, maybe six years old, approached and said their teacher had told them to ask us to collect our mules, which were sticking their noses into the classroom windows. I told them we didn’t have any mules. They shrugged their shoulders and walked back to school. When I turned to find out what Justo and Edgar were up to, I saw that perhaps a dozen mules had arrived and were consuming whatever small islands of weedy vegetation remained on the soccer field. The logo of a luxury travel outfitter whose all-inclusive trips I’d checked out online was emblazoned on their gear bags. The tents their muleteers were setting up next to the general store looked like they’d been bleached, starched and ironed. A distinctly American voice, the first I’d heard in weeks, drifted toward me:

  “Offer them fifteen-five. You’re authorized to go to seventeen.”

  I had overheard enough self-important financial conversations in Manhattan to know what to expect as I walked up the small hill that led back from the school yard. And sure enough, there he was: Mr. Super Deluxe Travel Guy. I recognized his boots as the most expensive kind available; the sales assistant at an outdoorsy shop near my home had recommended I buy them only if I were trying to summit Mount Everest. Solo. Without supplemental oxygen. The American was shouting into a cell phone as he walked around trying to find the spot with the strongest reception.

  “What? Can you hear me? I’m in the middle of bumfuck Per-ROO! I may not be able to get a good signal until tomorrow.” He turned to look for his guide. “Antonio! Do they have cell phone service at Machu Picchu?”

  “Claro! Of course! Like a crystal!”

  Mr. Super Deluxe Travel Guy breathed deeply like he’d taken a hit from his asthma inhaler. “Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as we get off the bus to Machu Picchu.”

  Sitting cross-legged on a rock off to the side was a slim, pretty woman with a ponytail. Her nose was buried in a book. The book happened to have been written by someone I knew, so I asked if she was enjoying it. When she said that she was, I introduced myself and told her a very embarrassing story about the author. She laughed and invited me to sit down. Her name was Katie.

  “Any idea what they’re doing up there?” she asked, pointing up at the men lighting the vegetation afire.

  “I think they’ve run out of land to pla
nt on. My friend told me that the easiest way to clear the brush off these mountains is to burn it and hope it doesn’t get out of control.”

  “Seems a shame,” she said. “It’s so beautiful here, everything is so green. When it’s not on fire, that is. Have you been to Machu Picchu yet?”

  “I think we’re going day after tomorrow. You?”

  “We’re going tomorrow. I can’t wait. Jason and I have been talking about doing this since we were in college.” Katie glanced at her husband, who was devouring a PowerBar and shouting a string of numbers into his phone as he continued to pace like a Buckingham Palace guard. “I swear I’ve had a Post-it that says ‘go to Machu Picchu’ stuck to my computer screen for about a million years. And finally, we’re here. Did you go to Choquequirao? Isn’t it incredible? I love it here. Of course he’s going crazy because he can’t get Yankee scores or real-time commodities prices.”

  “I haven’t been online for a few weeks,” I said. “Have I missed anything?”

  “I doubt it. We stopped to check e-mail in Santa Teresa. The biggest news story was about some kid who flew into space holding on to a balloon or something. Except maybe his parents made the whole thing up? It was kind of convoluted.”

  After weeks of conversations that had centered on rocks and mules and bowel movements and the occasional tendency of mules to have rocklike bowel movements, a few minutes of urbane adult chitchat felt like slipping into a hot bath with the Sunday New York Times. Katie and I talked about books in which no one freezes to death or falls into a crevasse. We talked about countries we had both visited, and restaurants we had both eaten at, and movies that she had seen and that I hoped to watch someday when my children left for college and I was again able to stay up past eight-thirty at night.

  “Hey,” Katie said, “we usually have cocktails before dinner, after we wash up. I’m not sure if I’m authorized to do this, but you know what? I’m paying a fortune for this trip and you definitely look like a man who could use a drink. So stop by if you want. And stay for dinner, too.”

  I looked over at my companions. Edgar was still snoozing under the Land Cruiser. Justo was trying to persuade a stray dog to eat a tub of rancid margarine. Then I looked across the campsite into Katie’s capacious cook tent. A man in chef’s whites and a French toque was chopping onions into microscopic pieces. The table probably resembled what Bingham saw at Huadquiña: eight seats, cloth napkins, multiple pieces of cutlery at each place setting. I may never master the machete, but a cocktail party? That’s my natural habitat. My mind wandered off in a reverie of ice cubes clinking into glass drinking vessels. Who knows, maybe they even had . . . coasters.

  I savored the caramel bite of an imaginary bourbon on the rocks for a few seconds. But I knew that I would never set foot in that tent. I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium pentothal. Having Justo watch me eat another cook’s food would have felt like taking part in a live sex act in Amsterdam. But most of all, I realized, I had something I’d rather do.

  “I really wish I could,” I told Katie. “But I already have an engagement.”

  John was right about Fructoso and his wife, as he was about almost anything that wasn’t an usnu—they were fantastic people. Their hut was smaller than some air-conditioning units I’ve seen in my neighborhood, so between John and me and the Fructosos and their two adult sons, we were quite cozy in spite of a cold rain that had started just after the sun went down. Fructoso apologized profusely for not having been around to carry our packs, and his wife plied us with gigantic mugs of coffee and bowls of choclo and a fresh-picked avocado the size of a cantaloupe for each of us. Maybe it was all the organic food they ate, but the whole family seemed to glow with positive energy.

  When John inquired how their honeybees were doing, Fructoso stood up and asked excitedly, “You want some honey?” Before we could politely decline, he dispatched one of his sons to fetch some. The son returned with a ten-gallon bucket filled almost to the top with honeycombs. “Eat! Eat! It’s fresh! It’s fresh!” Fructoso’s wife said encouragingly, clapping her tiny hands. John eagerly stuck his hand in and yelled, “Yagh!”

  The honey was fresh all right. It still had bees in it.

  THIRTY-TWO

  A Good Walk Spoiled

  At Llactapata

  The revised plan was that John and I would walk up to Llactapata alone. Justo and Edgar would drive our packs around to meet us at the Hidroeléctrica train station, where we could catch the train to Aguas Calientes, the tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu. We left at dawn.

  About halfway up the mountainside, we encountered a snake in our path, our fourth of the journey by my count. This one was different, because it was alive. John pinned it to the ground with his bamboo pole. “Quick, Mark, take a picture,” he said as the snake squirmed angrily to free itself. I leaned in close to get a good shot, then dropped to one knee to zoom in for a few seconds of action video.

  “Got it,” I said, slipping the camera back into my pocket. “So what was it—another one of those false coral garter snake things?”

  “Actually . . . no. Did you notice the diamond shape on its head? That means it was probably poisonous.” (When I e-mailed the photos to John later, he confirmed that it was a Bothrops pit viper—which “probably kills more people than any other snake in the Americas.”)

  An hour later, the slope began to level off. “Bingham saw almost none of what you’re going to see,” John said, parting some branches near the top of the hill. “He was in too big a hurry.” Indeed, Bingham had spent less than a day at Llactapata, both because he was in his usual rush to find the next big thing and because his porters were threatening mutiny. He had poked around, sketched out his customary excellent diagrams of a few buildings, decided that he’d seen “the ruins of an Inca castle,” and soldiered on ahead in search of the next item on his checklist. The next day his unhappy crew deserted him.

  John and I descended for a few minutes on the far side of the ridge, passing several crumbling structures, until we reached a building that had stonework similar to what we’d seen at Choquequirao. In front of the building was a grassy plaza, and beyond that was a steep drop. Straight across the chasm, laid out like a diorama, was Machu Picchu. The entire complex was sandwiched between the two peaks that mark its north and south ends—it couldn’t have been framed any better with red velvet curtains. We sat for a few minutes munching on chocolate bars and trading peeks through John’s scope. Yep, that was Machu Picchu all right. We had Llactapata all to ourselves. Across the valley, busloads of tour groups were disembarking outside the main entrance.

  John jerked his thumb back, then pointed forward. “There’s a direct solstice alignment from the temple here to the sun temple at Machu Picchu,” he said.

  I started to nod, as I always did when John began talking about solstice alignments. Then I stopped myself. “I have a confession to make,” I said, wiping chocolate on my sweaty sleeve. “I know we’ve been talking about this stuff for two weeks, and I think I get it. More or less. But when you start using words like ‘solstice’ and ‘alignment,’ I still don’t really know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  John jumped up and led me over to what had once been a long stone hallway of sorts, one that Bingham had mapped and measured in 1912. “For two weeks out of every year, the sun comes straight down this corridor,” John said, sweeping his gloved hands backward as if he were a matador ushering in the solar bull. “It’s right on the June solstice line, the point where the sun rises on the shortest day of the year. And it’s a straight shot to Machu Picchu. The Incas probably hung some sort of golden sheet or reflector at the end of it to reflect sunlight back to Machu Picchu. Can you imagine how spectacular that would have been? Machu Picchu would’ve still been dark, waiting for the sunrise, when the reflection would just shoot across the valley!

  “And in that direction on the summer solstice in December,” he said, looking at his GPS and pointin
g northwest, “you get a near-perfect alignment from Machu Picchu to Espiritu Pampa.”

  In layman’s terms, that meant that some Inca planner had taken the care to ascertain that this corridor would parallel the path of the rising sun—the father of the Sapa Inca himself—on one of the most important days of the year. He or someone like him also planned the locations of at least three important Inca sites—Machu Picchu, Llactapata and a carved rock shrine in the valley below that we were about to visit—to fall on an invisible line that bisected all three. I’d seen pictures of British oddballs dressed up like Druids at Stonehenge waiting for the sun to rise on the solstice, but that hardly compared to what John was talking about. The Incas had plotted these coordinates over thousands of square miles.

  Up to now I had been thinking of these places as Bingham had when first starting out, as self-contained lost cities and holy sites, akin to abandoned medieval villages and churches. Trails were just lines on a map connecting the dots. But if John was right, the Incas had seen things very differently. These sites and trails were more like organs and vessels, the circulatory system in a living body. A very big living body.

  “Llactapata was interconnected with Machu Picchu,” John said. “Count the trails!” He walked to the edge of the plaza and pointed across. “One, two, three, four, five, six. At least six Inca trails leading up to Machu Picchu. Everything was connected!”

  We walked down the mountainside beneath Llactapata and crossed the Aobamba River—an important milestone, because we were now officially inside the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary. Technically, this zone is a haven not only for ruins but for the diverse flora and fauna of the region. (This is one of the few safe places for the rare Andean spectacled bear, which looks like a cross between a raccoon and a black bear cub.) There is one important eco-exception—the gigantic hydroelectric plant on the back side of Machu Picchu. John and I walked past dozens of men in matching hard hats and coveralls driving heavy machinery; a funicular ran up the mountainside. KEEP OUT signs were posted everywhere. None of this is visible from the sacred ruins directly above. It was like stumbling upon a Bond villain’s secret hideout while hiking in Yosemite.