by Mark Adams
We arrived at Concevidayoc and made camp on a slope above the river. Juvenal, who referred to this stretch of path as “my trail” because he had been walking the route since he was a boy, said that there had been some Inca ruins in this area but that they had been dismantled to build something, either the old school at the top of the hill or the new school down by the river. He wasn’t sure. Any signs of the savage potentate Saavedra—whose bloodthirsty Indian army Bingham had professed to worry about—had vanished as well. Juvenal said that his grandfather remembered Saavedra as an eccentric neighbor who’d moved out around 1930.
The rain started again shortly after we fell asleep, and intensified through the night, with thunder loud enough to wake me more than once. In the morning, the campsite was a bog. The mules splashed up and down the hillside in a single-file line, Julián splashing behind them. Juvenal and Mateo sat on sawed-off logs inside a decrepit shed, warming their hands over a pile of burning sticks. John and I ate breakfast by candlelight. My copy of Bingham’s Inca Land, which I’d absentmindedly left in an uncovered pocket at Vista Alegre, was soaked through—which seemed appropriate since in the pages describing his journey to Espiritu Pampa, rain followed Bingham like a shadow, drenching his weary party day after day and leaking into his tent at night.
“This is a real Amazon rain,” John said, tearing his stale bread in half and picking off bits of mold. “It’ll be snowing hard on Choquetacarpo Pass. Those bridges we crossed yesterday? We’d be going over them on our hands and knees today.”
According to his account in Inca Land, Bingham continued down the trail toward Saavedra’s house at Concevidayoc not knowing how he’d be greeted. He sent one of his porters ahead to announce the group’s arrival. After waiting a tense thirty minutes, he wrote, “we were startled by the crackling of twigs and the sound of a man running. We instinctively held our rifles a little tighter in readiness.” The approaching noisemaker was Saavedra’s son, who came to offer his father’s warmest invitation. “It was with a sigh of relief that we realized there was to be no shower of poisoned arrows from the impenetrable thickets,” Bingham recalled, adding an extra dollop of melodrama.
Saavedra assured his visitors that he could get them to the ruins at Espiritu Pampa, though they’d have to wait for the path to be cleared as the old Inca site was “some distance farther down the valley, to be reached only by a hard trail passable for barefooted savages, but scarcely available for us,” Bingham wrote.
For the time being, we weren’t going anywhere, either. Mateo, always optimistic, stuck his head in the cook tent to share his opinion that the trail should be okay, because it was mostly rock. This elicited a rare guffaw from John. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. That trail we were on yesterday has probably landslided since then because of the rain. If we’d left Huancacalle a day later we’d be waiting back there for a long time.” He dipped his coca tea bag into his plastic mug. “There are two problems with an expedition in weather like this. Number one, you can’t get dry, so you’re always cold and at risk of hypothermia. Number two, the soil has no integrity, so it cannot support any weight. Plus, everything gets fungus—your tents, your feet. It’ll wear you down, like it did to Bingham. It’s better to just wait it out.”
Since we were stuck, I thought I’d ask John something that had been puzzling me almost from the moment I’d met him—namely, how a beach-loving engineer from the far side of Oz had ended up wandering alone through the mountains of Peru. He’d brushed off the question on the trail two or three times. Confined to the cook tent, he finally relented. The catalyst, I learned, was a broken heart. It wasn’t a girl, though. It was a travel outfitter.
“About 1987, Australia was becoming corrupt, more individual and selfish than it had been compared to the sixties and seventies. In Western Australia, where only a million people lived, we went ten billion dollars into the red. That’s ten thousand dollars for every man, woman and child. One day I was watching television and I saw this advert that showed a mass of people all horribly crammed together and one person climbing over them to the top—like that was supposed to be a good thing. And I thought, ‘I want out of this.’”
John had seen a brochure for London-based Encounter Overland, one of the first great adventure tour operators. The 1970s and ’80s were the glory days of adventure travel, when the Hippie Trail across Asia grew up from a rite of passage for hash-addled hitchhikers into a flourishing tourism business driven by the last wave of pre–Lonely Planet wanderers. (In the travel magazine business, this pennypinching personality was referred to, without affection, as the dirtbagger.) After initially showing skepticism at John’s application to work as a driver-cum-guide, Encounter offered him an apprenticeship. “I sold my car, had a great big booze-up, burned my bed. I had thirty or forty thousand dollars and put it all into investments that my tax man recommended. I flew out on Tuesday. Friday was Black Friday in the stock market. I lost half my money. I got the news in London, where I was sleeping on the oil-stained floor of an unheated workshop and earning thirteen pounds a week.”
John was assigned an early-1950s vintage Bedford, an open-backed truck with benches and a canvas top, and given charge of his clients for the next three to six months—more or less, since a driver never knew what contingencies might affect the schedule along the way. “One trip might have taken in Kathmandu, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zaire, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria, sometimes Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco. Then back through Europe to London. You never had enough hours to do everything. It was always pressure, pressure, pressure. Ninety percent of the job was hard work. Ah, but the other ten percent . . .
“In Peshawar, Pakistan, all the mujahedin with their AK-47s would come to the hotel and watch the six o’clock news to see how the war was going in Afghanistan. We got permission from the military to go to the black market, where they had Sony TVs, blocks of heroin and ganja. We fired rocket launchers in the arms market of Darra. In the Central African Republic, the thieves were so good, you could have two people watching the truck and in a tree above it there’d be a guy reeling in daypacks out of the back with a fishing pole. The scenery was incredible, of course. But you wouldn’t just see the gorillas and waterfalls. You’d live with the pygmies. Hunt with them. Sleep in their houses. In the middle of the night, dad would roll over onto mom, and do his business—hooga, hooga, hooga—and then go back to sleep. God, it was brilliant.”
Most people burned out as drivers after a year or two. John thrived. “When I first rolled into Cusco in 1991, I saw three foreigners in three days.” By the time he was named Encounter’s coordinator for South America in 1998, though, serious adventure travel’s moment had passed, replaced by a bragging-rights mentality. “Travel today is ticking things off: ‘Whew, I’ve done Machu Picchu, now I can get drunk.’
“It used to take three weeks to get people in the right frame of mind, to un-brainwash them. Now it would take three months just to get people’s heads straightened out. A lot of times, with women especially, these trips would change their lives. They’d go back to London, quit their jobs and sack their awful boyfriends. It’s a real problem now—people don’t know how to enjoy life. They want hedonism, short-term thrills.”
Eventually, John left Encounter. “Hardest decision I ever made,” he said. A couple of years later the company went bankrupt, taking most of John’s savings (and those of his colleagues) with it. Since then, he’d been making his way around Peru, notebook and cameras in hand, documenting what was left of the prehispanic culture. “No one followed up on Bingham’s work for years,” he said. “Maybe we could have saved more of these Inca sites. I’m trying to nut it all out, put it all together before it’s all gone. There’s Espiritu Pampa, Vitcos, Choquequirao and Machu Picchu. Everything else is being torn to pieces. Look around here. There’s nothing left here from Inca Concevidayoc. History is just f
ading away without being recorded.”
We stirred our steaming drinks and stared out at a wet dog that searched fruitlessly for a spot to dry off, circling past the tent opening every few minutes to see if we’d changed our minds about letting him in. Its paws were six inches deep in mud.
“Think we’d better wear our wellies today,” John said.
TWENTY-NINE
The Plain of Ghosts
At Espiritu Pampa
Eventually, the downpour slackened enough for us to start walking. Almost instantly, the scenery and climate changed once again, as if we’d pushed open the door to the tropical wildlife room at the Central Park Zoo. “Epiphytes, bromeliads, mosses! This is high rain forest!” John exulted, raising his arms. “Up there are the Andes. Down there is the Amazon.” He turned around. “Watch out, Mark, those leaves there will cut your hand like a razor if you touch them.”
After two days of waiting in Concevidayoc, Bingham’s party departed on Saavedra’s newly cut trail. A few hours of walking brought them to “the ruin of a small, rectangular building of rough stone, once probably an Inca watch-tower. From here to Espiritu Pampa our trail followed an ancient stone stairway, about four feet in width and nearly a third of a mile long.”
After a few hours of downhill walking we arrived at the same platform and scrambled up on top. Below us, we could see the long stairway that curved down into the thicket below. “Obviously, this is a very important usnu,” John said, pulling out his GPS. “Manco came up here. His sons, too, after he died. It connected down the valley, up the valley, and straight down into Espiritu Pampa. Imagine how impressive it must’ve been to look down from here onto hundreds of buildings. Of course Bingham saw none of that—it would’ve been a mat of dark green down there.” It still was.
Our slow walk down the winding staircase felt like descending into a forgotten world. The sound of moving water had followed us all the way from Vitcos, but the heavy tropical air here was still and quiet. I half expected to hear the roar of a Tyrannosaurus or the shriek of a pterodactyl. It was obvious why Manco had thought he’d be safe hiding here. In the 1980s this dense jungle had also been a stronghold of the Shining Path, the ruthless Maoist paramilitary organization that sought to ignite a revolution by executing thousands of their fellow Peruvians—rich and poor; men, women and children—often for no obvious purpose other than to incite fear. The group’s reign of terror came to an abrupt end in 1992 when its charismatic leader, who went by the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo, was discovered living above a ballet studio in Lima. “There was a long period of time when guys like Mateo and Julián had to work on their farms during the day and hide in the bush at night,” John said. “The Shining Path moved after dark and it wasn’t safe to be caught sleeping in your house.” John had heard that pockets of militants were still based in the area, trafficking cocaine.
John and I signed in at the Espiritu Pampa welcome hut. I scanned the register and calculated that outsiders had been trickling in at a rate of twenty to thirty per month. At the moment, there were exactly two visitors at the lost city Bingham had been searching for when he found Machu Picchu instead. John and me.
John’s good humor evaporated when he saw that the mule team had set up our tents in the official campground. At least two dozen vocal turkeys and chickens free-ranged all over our equipment. To me, the accommodations didn’t look too bad, and I’d long since given up hope of sleeping anyplace that didn’t sound (and smell) like Old Mac-Donald’s farm. There was a running spring to fetch water, an adobe brick shithouse and even a small chapel that didn’t look like it saw a lot of business. A territorial rooster hopped atop a rock and screamed its lungs out at us for about ten seconds, until Mateo, in one smooth motion, picked up a piece of packing rope, fashioned a lariat, lassoed the annoying bird around its skinny legs and gave it a quick spin through the air.
John had explicitly asked the muleteers to set up camp inside the compound reserved for INC workers, which was much closer to the ruins. Juvenal was prepared with a checklist of reasons why he couldn’t comply with John’s orders: “The INC wouldn’t allow it. The caretaker thinks that the mules will eat all the grass. There’s no water available at the other site.” He didn’t mention one more possibility for his choice: nostalgia. The Cobos family had once farmed the land we were on. The caretaker’s house directly behind us was Juvenal’s childhood home, now occupied by his cousin and his family.
John fumed. “I camped up there last time and it was fine. That does it. I’m tired of giving the INC everything and getting nothing in return. I’m not talking to anyone from the INC this time.” He went inside his tent and noisily unpacked his gear.
“It sounds like he’s fighting a llama in there,” Justo said to me.
“You think John is angry?”
“No, I think he’s crazy. But he’ll get over it.”
Thirty minutes later, John and I were standing inside the INC compound, encircled by a dozen young government workers who’d stopped scrubbing pottery shards to gawk at John’s photo album. His pictures were serious entertainment in a place with no phones, Internet, Xbox or electricity. (“We get a lot of sleep,” one fellow told me when I asked what they did for fun.) The commune, with its thatchroofed huts, looked like a remote Polynesian village, and was almost as isolated. Every worker was male, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, except for the boss, Javier, who looked about thirty. One guy was doing bicep curls with a barbell fashioned from a bamboo pole and soda bottles filled with water. Some budding entrepreneur had gathered a bumper crop of achiote leaves, which are sold as an herbal remedy for prostate problems, and spread them out on the ground to dry.
We stepped into Javier’s office, where he and his lieutenant, Paul, were piecing together an intricately carved wooden drinking vessel, a kero, the fragments of which had recently been dug up. John and Javier knew each other from a few years back when they’d crossed paths at an excavation near Machu Picchu. Javier and Paul were thrilled to have a chance to show off their work. “Here, you want to hold it?” Paul said to me, thrusting the fragile four-hundred-year-old artifact into my hands. The woodwork was exquisite, with geometric patterns overlaying one another so tightly they might have been woven. “Just think, an Inca drank out of that,” he said.
“Let’s take a look at the ruins,” Javier said.
Bingham had been escorted to Espiritu Pampa by “two adult savages we had met at Saavedra’s, accompanied by a cross-eyed friend, all wearing long tunics.” Juvenal had told me that these Indians were Campas, and that as a boy he’d seen them living in the ruins, still dressed like monks; they remained there until the Shining Path scared everyone away in the 1980s. Various subgroups of Campas still lived nearby, somewhere not far beyond the ranges, but the secretive tribe didn’t welcome outsiders. “Basically, they’re the same people that Bingham met,” John said. “God, I’d love to go in there. They could tell a few tales, take you to a few places.”
Javier had a slightly less romanticized view. He’d only seen the Campas once, when they came down from the hills, wearing their traditional costumes. That visit was enough for one lifetime. “Mark, if you meet any natives in the forest, run away,” he told me. “They live by their own laws.”
Unlike the spiffy ruins at Machu Picchu and Choquequirao, the village square at Espiritu Pampa looks like it might have been found last year. Families had hacked out small farms along the entrance path, wherever an acre or two could be reclaimed from the foliage. The welcome sign was a sun-bleached wood plank hand carved in block letters, nailed to the trunk of a looming, hundred-foot-tall matapalo tree: BIENVENIDOS A ESPIRITU PAMPA. There was a sense that the jungle was just barely being kept at bay. Small teams of roving teenagers called vigilantes—the name in Spanish simply means “watchmen”—wielded machetes to make sure it didn’t happen. Matapalos trees—the strangler figs that smother their hosts—had grown over and under and through buildings, to the point where trees and buildings were
inseparable. Many of the stone walls were propped up with two-by-fours.
Bingham’s Campa guides led him to “a natural terrace on the banks of a little tributary of the Pampaconas [River],” a spot they called Eromboni Pampa. Almost immediately, one Indian showed the explorer the foundation of a huge building, which measured 192 feet in length. Nearby was a three-spouted Inca fountain. Several hundred feet away, “hidden behind a curtain of hanging vines and thickets so dense we could not see more than a few feet in any direction,” they found a group of stone houses whose construction materials and style “pointed to Inca builders.”
The next day, Bingham’s cutters found two well-preserved Inca buildings in good condition and a stone bridge. The buildings were of “superior construction, well-fitted with stone pegs and numerous niches, very symmetrically arranged,” the explorer observed. There the discoveries ended abruptly. “Saavedra’s son questioned the savages carefully,” Bingham wrote. “They said they knew of no other antiquities.”
One minor discovery struck Bingham as “very puzzling.” These were “half a dozen crude Spanish roofing tiles, baked red . . . of widely different sizes, as though some one had been experimenting. Perhaps an Inca who had seen the new red tiled roofs of Cuzco had tried to reproduce them here in the jungle, but without success.”
Having seen the high-altitude Inca architecture of Cusco and Vitcos, the insect-choked ruins Bingham found at steamy Espiritu Pampa were a letdown. The geographical clues he’d found in the Spanish chronicles indicated that he was standing in the lost city of Vilcabamba. But Bingham found it difficult to imagine that an emperor who had settled with his followers in those spectacular mountain aeries could ever have convinced them to live in a modest jungle exurb. “It does not seem reasonable,” he hypothesized, that such people “would have cared to live in the hot valley of Espiritu Pampa.”
