The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  When WQ died, he had perhaps fifty sons. It’s unclear what happened, but he either divided his kingdom between two of them or left murky instructions on who was to succeed him, and the empire was split between two half brothers. Huáscar maybe had the nobler mother, and took control in Cusco. Atahualpa, meanwhile, was leading an army up around Ecuador. In the war that followed, Atahualpa barely escaped death at one point, only to turn it around and capture Huáscar and crush his army. Huáscar was made to drink llama piss and then he was led in ropes to Cusco, where all of his wives and children were killed in front of him. Then he was killed.

  Around that time, news came that a band of hairy pale monster men had turned up, riding snorting four-legged war animals never seen before.

  * * *

  Francisco Pizarro, the guy who would “conquer” the Inca, had 168 Spaniards with him, some African and Nicaraguan slaves, and 68 horses. They didn’t know it, but they’d just landed in an empire three times bigger than Spain.

  Pizarro followed the Cortés playbook. He was Cortés’s second cousin, in fact, and the older conquistador may have given the kid advice, years ago in Spain. Pizarro lured Atahualpa and his army into the main square of the city of Cajamarca, fired hidden artillery, charged out on horseback, captured the emperor, and killed some two thousand stunned Inca. He kept Atahualpa hostage while the emperor directed his guys to fill a room with gold. The Spanish were so into gold that some Incas thought their horses must eat it. In the end, Pizarro decided to have Atahualpa burned at the stake, for treason or heresy or not telling Pizarro that there was a whole other Inca army out there somewhere. After a priest tried to get the baffled emperor to accept Jesus Christ and the Pope and the Catholic faith, which didn’t work, they bailed on the burning idea and strangled him.

  To say Pizarro “conquered” the Inca Empire wouldn’t be right. At the time of his death, the old Inca world had a guerrilla insurrection going on underneath a Spanish-versus-Spanish civil war. All Pizarro’s guys nearly died several times. Plenty of them did die, their heads bashed in or crushed by huge rocks rolled down on them in deadly traps. Pizarro himself was saved from destruction at least once by the timely arrival of reinforcements. The Incas would fight it out for thirty-some years. Pizarro would end up bleeding to death in his own house in Lima, the city he founded, stabbed by conspirators after a dispute with the son of his old business partner. His bones were lost for centuries, though they’re now believed to be in a box in Lima’s cathedral. In 1572, some Spaniards found the last Inca emperor and his wife hiding in the Amazon. They hauled him back to Cusco and hanged him for religious heresy.

  Kind of a bad scene for everybody.

  If the Spanish were trying to wipe out any trace of the Inca, they did not succeed. In Cusco you can see the Inca anywhere you go.

  Saqsaywaman with San Pedro and Alan Tang

  WHY DOESN’T ANYONE TALK ABOUT THIS PLACE?!”

  So said Tang, and I agreed. I was also furious to think we might’ve missed Saqsaywaman.

  If you see one thing in Cusco, make it the ruins of the old Inca castle, a fortress on the hill above the city, once so huge it’s said it could’ve held the entire population of the old city, maybe a hundred thousand Incas. Here, there was a ferocious fight between Pizarro’s guys and Inca die-hards, the Inca emperor Manco having decided to fight to the death against the Spanish after his two immediate predecessors had been burned at the stake and strangled right before being burned at the stake, respectively. From the towers of Saqsaywaman, Incas had jumped to their deaths, landing on piles of bodies of their comrades.

  We were extra stimulated perhaps because we had taken some San Pedro.

  Wade Davis, in his pamphlet Sacred Plants of the San Pedro Cult (Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University, Vol. 29, No. 4, Fall 1983), writes that “the high northern Andean valley of Huancabamba, Peru, is the centre of an extraordinary moon-oriented magico-religious healing cult, a fundamental feature of which is the nocturnal ingestion by patients and curandero of the mescaline-rich San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi Britton et Rose).” In a more casual interview, Davis recounts how he took “heroic amounts” of San Pedro and had to be stopped from telegramming his professor, “EUREKA! we’re all just ambulatory plants!” (“That wouldn’t have gone over so well,” says Davis.)

  Sure, I wanted to try that. I’d been telling Tang about my experiments so far with South American hallucinogenic plants. He was very game. To my surprise, the first guy I asked at the first weird little occult shop I found in Cusco said he had some, and sold me a baggy of greenish-blue powder he took from a drawer in his desk. Whether this was really ground-up powder extracted from the native Andean Trichocereus pachanoi I couldn’t say for sure, but it definitely made me feel weird.

  “That giant green mound over there is pulsating and then disappearing,” said Tang, staring into the distance. “That’s good, right?”

  I had to agree the ground seemed a little more wobbly than usual, but it seemed fine. Nearby, a kid played with her baby sister while a llama worked its gums and looked on. There were a few stray llamas, and a few stray German tourists, both odd creatures but friendly and harmless. An hour before sundown, and we were climbing around on the gigantic rocks and immense walls of Saqsaywaman—it is pronounced more or less like “sexy woman,” there’s no need for a false maturity. Below was the whole long valley, the city of Cusco from the ancient plaza and the cathedral, stretching out and growing up the sides of the slopes beyond.

  Astounding place, the ruined castle of a fantastical kingdom. Peering into the valley, I couldn’t help but be astounded by the Incas and by everything that had grown up since, everything you could see on this April Tuesday in Peru.

  “DAMN!” said Tang, who says stuff enthusiastically. “AND WE HAVEN’T EVEN SEEN MACHU PICCHU YET!”

  How to Get to Machu Picchu

  If you’re hard-core, you can walk. The trip can be as long as you want. There are something like 25,000 miles of remnant Inca roads and trails. You can hike for forever in Peru.

  If you take the “classic Inca Trail,” you’ll walk for four or five days. You’ll start at a high altitude where air is thin and go up another four or five thousand feet, through cloud forest, past old Inca temples and way houses. You’ll have to go with a guide company, because the government only gives out a limited number of permits. Porters will carry most of the stuff for you. Hikers are always sheepish about this, trying to be tough, but the guide companies will smile at you and pat you on the head and most likely you’ll end up agreeing you’d never make it. If you’re truly hard-core, you can find your own guide and insist on carrying your own stuff, but it isn’t easy. It’s prohibited to go up there without a guide, which is maybe as it should be. Foreigners hauling off all the best stuff from Peru has been a problem for half a millennium now. Can’t blame them for wanting to supervise their own trail.

  What counts as a real adventure is an electric subject travelers of all stripes can get anxious or hot about. Maybe that’s how it should be, too. The human urge and desire to seek adventure is noble, as a species one of our best qualities. We like it in ourselves and others, and we should admire great examples of it and be inspired to push ourselves. We’re all on our own level, though. For some its brave to haul yourself to the store, while for others the Inca Trail is a bit of a joke, easy stuff for vacation warriors.

  To treat Machu Picchu like the epic goal of a quest, like a place of pilgrimage, is a good instinct. I’m down with the folks who seek out a bit of challenge, who believe you appreciate stuff when you earn it. This is a very New England way of thinking, I get it.

  But: Knowing what I’ve told you about Alan Tang, do you think we slogged on humid trails for four days and arrived sweaty and exhausted and unshowered for dawnrise over the Gate of the Sun? No. This dude was on vacation and he had come to do it right. He had booked us on a comfortable train where they serve yo
u a magnificent lunch with all the Pisco sours you can drink while a band plays Peruvian music and you glide along with the Sacred Valley out your window until you are delivered to a train station, where you are transferred to an air-conditioned bus and brought up right to the edge of the cliff, where you can suddenly gaze down on the boggling ruins on the narrow green plain high on the shoulder of the mountains.

  What Is Machu Picchu?

  If there were no ruins in Machu Picchu, it would still be a spectacular spot worth a long trip to see. You go up a zigzag road on the side of a mountain, then you’re looking across a ridge, very narrow, two hundred meters, two football fields or so from dropping cliff edge to cliff edge. On the far side, the ridge narrows and narrows and drops out of sight and then rises up again to form the sharp peak of a mountain, Huayna Picchu.

  Oh, but there are ruins. Terraces, the remnants of drains and fountains, more than a hundred and fifty buildings, towers, baths, storehouses, temples. . . . Actually: Who knows what they all are?

  Yale assistant professor Hiram Bingham discovered these ruins in 1911. By “discovered” I mean he heard about it and had a map with MACHU PICCHU marked on it and he paid a local guy at the bottom of the mountain to take him up there. But, fair enough, he was the first guy to photograph it, and write about it in National Geographic. The ruins as he saw them were overgrown and wild, but still stunning.

  Bingham was sure what he’d found: the lost city of the Incas. Historians knew there was one. After Pizarro, the Incas had hidden out somewhere for nearly forty years. Somewhere, there was known to be a mysterious city. Any Spaniard who got close was killed. A captured friar was taken there, but then pretty fast he was tortured and killed. This lost city was called Vilcabamba. It was known to be big, with large temples. But in the end it was burned, and the location forgotten. If any Quechua farmers passed down the knowledge of it, they didn’t tell the explorers who came looking. In time, historians read of the lost city in old documents, became obsessed with it. There were a few scant clues. But no one could find it.

  Bingham declared that he had. He’d found the lost city. Vilcabamba was Machu Picchu. He became internationally famous. He was elected governor of Connecticut, and then to the US Senate, and then reelected. While in the Senate, he got in trouble for letting a lobbyist act as his representative at a committee meetings on tariffs, which was a little blatant, even for the semicorrupt Congress of the time. Then he got beat by a Democrat.

  Here’s the thing: Hiram Bingham was not totally honest. He must’ve known that he hadn’t really found Vilcabamba. The descriptions of it weren’t really like Machu Picchu. The lost city was still out there. He was fudging. Typical Yale behavior. Since Bingham, a variety of eccentrics and explorers have, it seems, found the real Vilcabamba. It’s overrun by jungle. Thrilling to archaeologists, but not nearly as picturesque for tourists.

  The irony is Bingham had found something maybe more amazing. Machu Picchu wasn’t the rumored lost city. So what the hell was it?

  Well, maybe it was a remote shrine-city populated by sacred female virgins. That was another idea Bingham had. A very sexy one. You can’t accuse him of not having cool ideas.

  A kind of royal resort, says Kim MacQuarrie. A hilltop estate for the court of Pachacuti, the greatest Inca emperor of all. Like Camp David, sort of.

  Maybe it was a monastery, a religious center. An Incan university, a place to study astronomy and engineering. A sort of health spa, perhaps. A sprawling vacation compound for the tens of illegitimate royal children and their families.

  My favorite idea, the one Tang and I looked for evidence of as we climbed around, a beautiful morning for a mountaintop ruin, is that Machu Picchu was a prison. Like an Incan Alcatraz, for high-born prisoners or political or religious dissidents or something. You look at it that way, and for all its majesty, it can start to seem depressing. There’s no way you’d escape from there, not unless you were ready to jump a thousand feet off a steep cliff into an unseen ravine and hope you hit something squishy.

  What to Do at Machu Picchu

  Take pictures. This is the number one most popular activity there by a mile. No wonder, it’s dramatic background. At this point we probably have enough pictures of Machu Picchu. But people like to have their own, and it gives you an activity.

  Take stuff in and out of your backpack. Saw a lot of people doing this one. I did it plenty myself.

  Explore. This one I recommend. If you get away from the main ruins, there’re all kinds of crazy sites to discover. There’s a sheer cliff wall where once was slung a rope bridge. I’m glad it’s not there anymore, or I would’ve had to walk across it, which would’ve been terrifying.

  Feed an apple to a llama. There are llamas grazing around on Machu Picchu, as there should be, as there have long been, perhaps. My Amazon friends Mick and Maddie had come from this way. They’d given me the good tip to bring an apple, which apparently llamas enjoy. So they did. You should see them chomp and tooth-mush and gum away at the apples. Tang would agree that was the highlight of the trip. Girls gathered around with joy to watch our apple-happy llama.

  Ponder? Muse aloud or imagine in silence the wondrous lives that once were lived here?

  * * *

  Kind of a weird question, maybe, what to do at a place like Machu Picchu, but I kept running into it. The main thing about Machu Picchu is to see it, take it all in, gaze upon it, gape your jaw in wonder. Gape you will, it is a wonder for sure. That gape is worth the whole trip, I agree. But gazing upon something . . . that takes, what, twenty minutes? Then what do you do?

  I’m not sure I know. Nor did anyone else. They were led around by guides, took pictures, took stuff in and out of their backpacks, looked around at the place, and looked around at each other.

  Tang and I went off and climbed around, tried to see the inside of everything we could, studied the stones, and searched for clues that maybe, just maybe, this was once the most inescapable prison in the world.

  Now it was the end of April. A month or so before I had to be back in Los Angeles to start a new TV writing job. Not a ton of time to see 2,966 miles, but I work fast.

  First, though: Tang and I took a detour to meet our friend Amy Smozols and see one of the most special places on Earth.

  A place in fact that’s as close as possible to feeling like you’re not on this planet at all.

  The Galápagos and Bolivia

  Away Team Mission to the Galápagos

  Technically, I guess the Galápagos are outside the range of the book. Though they’re part of Ecuador, and thus “in” South America, they’re almost six hundred miles out in the ocean. That’s far enough to be its own world.

  The Galápagos are a bunch of volcanic islands, divided by the Equator. There are eighteen serious islands, the biggest sixty-two miles across, and four “minor” ones, one of which is called Nameless Island, which is a funny paradox.

  The reason why the Galápagos are so special is that they are full of animals. Wild, wonderful, weird animals.

  Because they are isolated on faraway islands, these animals could evolve in bizarre and specialized or just surprising ways. So there are crabs that look like they’re painted blue and red, and birds with enormous fire-truck red air sacs under their beaks that they can inflate and deflate, and blue birds with huge ridiculous feet, and tortoises that can live to be 170.

  On most of the islands, there are no people, there are only animals. The animals have never been bothered much by people. For generation after generation the animals could get weirder and weirder without anyone bothering them or hunting them.

  When these animals see people now, they react the same way they did when Charles Darwin saw them in 1835. They act like you’re nothing. They walk right up to you and then past you, ignoring you completely. You can walk right up to them, stare them in the eye. If they stare back at all, it’s to say, “What? Who gives a shit?
Are you gonna fuck me or fight me? No? Okay, well, you’re none of my business and not my problem then,” and they get back to sitting on their nests or rolling in the sand.

  We saw: SO many sea lions and Nazca boobies and red-footed boobies, and frigate birds with flush red sacs under their beaks, both Great and Magnificent. We saw swallow-tailed gulls and flightless cormorants, terns and egrets and herons and pink flamingos picking tiny shrimp out of the mud. Oystercatchers and plovers and all kinds of finches. Plus at least three types of iguana and a giant tortoise.

  It’s so strange and wonderful. You step onto some island forged into topographic curiosity by geology and weather over millions of years, and walk past whole harems of female sea lions, the alpha male eying his rivals, the pups flopping around and flipping sand on themselves, and past nests of blue-footed boobies and scattering crowds of Sally Lightfoot crabs, and whatever other far extreme of the branching tree of life is passing by.

  Darwin was sailing around with the British navy as, like, a guest naturalist when he saw the Galápagos. On these islands, he said, “We seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

  YAAAS kween! That is how I want my scientists to talk and think and write! I love when scientists invite me to join them on their humble journey near to the great mystery of mysteries!