Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  “In 1928, my grandfather, Emilio Abril, said that it was too hard for private people to take care of archaeological properties,” Roxana told me. “The owners of the land cannot prevent the huaqueros. So he offered to sell Machu Picchu to the government of Peru. In 1935, they gave an answer—‘Okay, we’ll buy it.’”

  “Wait, they took seven years to respond?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Mark, here in Peru things take a very long time.”

  Should Roxana ever write her autobiography, that would make an excellent title. Her grandfather gave the chunk of land on which Machu Picchu sat to the state, and over the coming decades, her family continued to farm its property around the ruins, which were still relatively obscure. Roxana remembered walking parts of the Inca Trail as a girl and visiting its various sites. In the 1940s, her grandfather sold off much of his remaining land. (The family that purchased the Abril land is now also claiming title to Machu Picchu. It gets a little complicated.) According to Roxana, all her family ever received from the government in return for what became one of the most valuable pieces of land in South America were some worthless bonds. One of Roxana’s most vivid memories from her girlhood is of her father and brothers going to Lima to ask for the money they felt they were owed. “They never got an answer!” Roxana dug her phone out of her purse and dialed a number. “You should talk to my lawyer,” she said, cupping the mouthpiece. “I have a very good lawyer. He says that half of the pieces at Yale belong to my family because we had not sold the property when Bingham came. Alo?” We sat staring at each other across the table for a minute while she listened to someone on the other end.

  “His secretary says he’s out of the country on business.”

  “When did you start your legal proceedings?” I asked.

  “I sent my first letter in 2003.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “I’m still waiting to hear back.”

  “What sorts of damages are you asking for?”

  “I want to ask for one hundred million dollars. The price of three years of entry fees at Machu Picchu.”

  “What would you do if the government said, “Okay, Roxana, you win. We’re going to give Machu Picchu back to you.”

  “Well, I would stop letting in so many tourists. And I’d get rid of that highway for the bus.” This was the Hiram Bingham Highway, the zigzagging road up the eastern face of the ridge. Roxana folded her arms across her chest. “If people want to visit, let them go by foot like the Incas used to.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  On Bingham’s Trail

  Ollantaytambo and Beyond

  The paro was due to begin at midnight Wednesday. John called my hotel at around three o’clock that afternoon. We were going to make a run for it. “Everything’s packed. We’ll pick you up at six,” he said. Edgar would drive us out to Ollantaytambo in the Land Cruiser. From there we could either haul our stuff the ten miles to the Inca Trail or hope that the strikers were being a little less vigilant outside of Cusco and would let a taxi through. Whether our guide, Efrain, who had our entry tickets, would be able to make it was a question that would have to wait for an answer. He was out of pocket, guiding another trip somewhere.

  The seriousness of our situation was made clear when Edgar showed up a mere forty-five minutes late. Evidently, strikes were the only events in Peru that began in accordance with Greenwich Mean Time. As we drove out of town in the dark, Edgar passed the time the way he usually did, by quizzing John about his world travels.

  “So, John,” he said, looking into the rearview mirror, “what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten?”

  “Oh, you know. Ants. Monkey.”

  Edgar nodded his head in agreement. “Monkey is riquisimo!”—delicious. “Come on, John, everyone knows your famous appetite. You mean to tell me that’s the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten—monkey?”

  “I once ate a cockroach, but that was on a bet back in Australia. I also once, after quite a lot of beer, ate a kilo of butter.” He leaned forward between the front seats. “Won ten dollars on that bet.”

  “Which you then spent on twenty loaves of bread, I hope,” I said.

  “Actually, I seem to remember something about a three-foot sausage after that. Sort of a salami.”

  “Did your heart surgeon happen to ask if you’d ever consumed an entire lifetime’s worth of trans fats in one evening?”

  “Like I said, we drank a lot of beer that night.”

  Ollantaytambo is perhaps the last inhabited town in Peru that has maintained its street grid laid out as it was under the Incas. This makes it a historically interesting place to pay a visit but, considering that the Incas didn’t use wheeled vehicles, not a great place to drive. During a typical day, swarms of taxis and motorized rickshaws crowd the narrow streets, spewing diesel fumes and honking their horns as they swerve around the souvenir vendors who spill from the sidewalks. Nighttime is, if anything, worse, as trains collect and disgorge tourists coming and going from Machu Picchu. After waiting in traffic for an hour and moving only about twenty feet, John and I hopped out of the Land Cruiser and walked uphill to the town past rows of stopped buses and vans, all filled with unhappy faces, nervously awaiting the witching hour.

  The next morning, Ollantaytambo was a ghost town. Every vendor but one had taken the day off. The only vehicle I saw in operation was a BMX bike upon which a kid was doing tricks in front of the one open café. It felt like a snow day. In the afternoon, I poked my head into the building that had once been Bingham’s Yankihausi (nothing remained) and spent a long time staring up at the empty ruins where Manco Inca had made his final stand on horseback against the Spaniards, before escaping to Vitcos and Vilcabamba.

  The following morning I woke before dawn, uncertain how—or if—we were going to meet our porters at KM 82, starting point of the Inca Trail. The last we’d heard from Efrain, Cusco was in lockdown and he was thinking about sneaking out of town on a motorbike.

  As I walked out of my room, I almost bumped into an Andeanlooking fellow in a red ski hat who was heading up the stairs.

  “Buenos días,” I said, trying to diagram the next Spanish sentence in my foggy head. “Do you know if it continues strong, the strike?”

  “You look like Clark Kent,” the fellow replied, in English. Efrain had made it.

  We went down to the hotel dining room for a much-needed coca tea. Efrain had left Cusco at 2 A.M. in a tiny Tico taxi, a vehicle that Peruvians call a coffin on wheels, but they exaggerate; it actually looks more like a washing machine on wheels. Efrain had traveled between midnight and dawn, when the strikers were sleeping off the day’s libations. Each time his taxi approached a roadblock, he’d asked the driver to kill the lights. He then rolled away the boulders, waved the Tico through, and put the rocks back where he’d found them.

  “Isn’t that a little dangerous?” I asked.

  “Nah. The last time I did it the strikers were a lot angrier,” Efrain said. “I had to bring bottles of pisco, and cartons of cigarettes.” Whenever he stopped, he’d hand out packs of smokes, stuff a few ten-sol bills into shirt pockets and do shots of brandy with the strikers. Eventually, someone would shout, “This guy is all right!” and wave his taxi through. “By the time I met my clients in the morning, though, I could barely stand.”

  Efrain walked into the hotel’s kitchen and sweet-talked the motherly cook in Quechua, until she laughed and poured him a large mug of what looked like weak beef broth. He said it was maca, an old Andean energy drink made from a root that grows at high altitudes. After one mugful, he sat up straighter and started speaking more clearly. (I later learned that maca has a reputation for being stimulating in other ways. In the United States it’s marketed as “organic Viagra.”) Thus fortified, he walked into town to get a sense of how serious the local strikers were about enforcing the paro on the second day. To my great relief, the fervor had cooled a bit and we were able to hire a car to take us to KM 82 to start the hike. There we met our tea
m of six porters, who would be carrying everything we needed on their backs— tents, cooking gear, even a portable toilet. (Regulations now limit each porter’s burden to fifty-five pounds, but I wondered if wages were prorated to reflect the nature of one’s burden.) We introduced ourselves, and they hoisted their loads, each the size of a small bookcase, and walked rapidly away.

  “We used to pull ourselves across here on a sort of cable,” John said when we approached the bridge spanning the Urubamba. According to Peter Frost’s excellent guidebook Exploring Cusco, for years the only access to the trail was via a metal basket with a pulley system, operated for a fee that was often renegotiated as the hiker was halfway across the Urubamba River. The footloose days when a traveler could arrive in Cusco and decide at the last minute to hike the Inca Trail have long since passed. I’d had to book our spots three months in advance.

  Efrain was thirty-three and handsome, with a smile that looked like it could bite through a corncob. He knew the Inca Trail about as well as I knew the path from my kitchen sink to the refrigerator. He’d walked it three hundred times, more or less. (He’d lost count.) He’d run the Trail twice, as part of the Inca Trail Marathon, which is about a mile longer than a regular marathon. (He finished in just over four hours, which would be a very respectable finish for 26.2 miles at sea level.) Efrain had a Dickensian life story: He’d been born in the Amazon jungle and grew up speaking Quechua for the first few years of his life. When the Shining Path began terrorizing Peru’s countryside in the late 1980s, his mom was unable to feed all her kids, and so left him in an orphanage in Cusco—he was nine—and went off to Lima with his siblings. The orphanage was run by a woman from California, whom Efrain called his “second mother.” This explained why even though he’d never been to the States, he spoke English like a guy from Orange County. Efrain had worked his way through school selling crafts, and later took a job as a porter to save money to earn a degree as a guide. (“On my first trip the load was so heavy that I cried,” he told me. “The other porters laughed.”) He was working at a luxury hotel when a guest asked if he knew the Inca Trail. Efrain lied and said yes. “At KM 82, I told the client that I’d be right back, went around the corner and started asking everyone, ‘Hey, do you know how to get to the Inca Trail?’” Now he was one of the most sought-after guides on the trail; he’d recently led a minor member of the British royal family on a trek, along with her bodyguards.

  John, Efrain and I walked for two or three hours along a wellmarked trail, passing the occasional dry-goods mini mercado selling nuts and bottled water, or chicha stand, where teams of porters rehydrated. The midwinter landscape was arid and the air dry. Efrain had two little girls back home in Cusco, and his guiding style was more fatherly than John’s. He checked frequently to make sure I was carrying water and wearing sunscreen. He also asked some general probing questions to get an idea of what sort of client I was—a know-it-all norteamericano? A bucket-list tourist? A woo-woo spiritual seeker?—and filled in some more details of his life story. He’d made peace with his mother after the whole orphanage thing, and had started a foundation of his own to help send homeless kids to school.

  “You’re not a Catholic, Mark, are you?” he asked.

  “Well, yeah, technically, yes, I am.”

  “Great! So you understand that everything happens for a reason.”

  Near the end of the afternoon, we approached what appeared to be a slight ridge. “Okay,” Efrain said, then walked a few steps ahead, turned toward John and me and held his hands up. “You and John link arms.” I raised an eyebrow. I’m pretty sure John groaned. “Trust me,” Efrain said. “Now close your eyes and walk forward twenty paces. I said trust me.” We did as told. “Okay, about ten more paces. Don’t open your eyes or you’ll ruin the surprise. Now five more, slowly.” A gust of cool wind came up from somewhere and nearly blew my hat off. I heard the sound of rushing water.

  “Okay, open your eyes. This is my way of saying, ‘Welcome to the Inca Trail.’”

  Below us were the ruins of Patallacta, where Bingham’s men had excavated many of the skeletal remains found by the 1915 expedition. The site was immense. It looked as if someone had filled the Roman Colosseum with wet sand and dumped it onto the side of a mountain, and then built a small village on top of the new plateau. A river flowed in front of the ghost town like a moat.

  When I signed up for this trip, John had told me that I had two choices—a four-day trip or a five-day one. He strongly recommended the longer (and far less popular) option. It didn’t make sense to fly thousands of miles to hike the Inca Trail, only to rush through it, but the vast majority of people preferred to hurry. Now here we were, at what Efrain called “the most important site between Ollantaytambo and Machu Picchu,” and there wasn’t a single other hiker in sight.

  The day’s last sunlight was scratching the tops of the mountains, and John and I had just enough time to run down to the river in our bathing suits for a quick wash. I stood on a rock along the bank and splashed the frigid water on myself in the deepening blue light. John waded out into the current and sat down on a boulder. He removed his jacket and then to my great surprise his hat—the big reveal was that he was a little bald on top—and then doused himself with the glacial water. “Look at this, Mark!” he shouted, pointing to his chest. There was a red scar running down the center, about the size of a pocket comb, where the surgeon had cracked open his sternum. “I think I’m getting some feeling back in the left side of my chest!”

  Patallacta is now believed to have been a satellite of Machu Picchu, a settlement where several hundred laborers resided and much of the food consumed at Machu Picchu was grown. We sat down to what may have been the first low-fat meal served there since the death of Atahualpa. Actually, it was more a low-fat style meal, since John noticed an empty can of condensed milk next to the suspiciously rich potato soup. “Looks like I better take an extra statin,” he said, pulling a vial of heart pills from his jacket.

  After dinner, John went straight to bed. I put on my headlamp and followed Efrain into the blackness of the immense valley, across the river and into the ruins. The most impressive building at Patallacta was a sun temple with rounded walls, which looked like a rustic replica of the Torreon at Machu Picchu. There was even a small cave underneath.

  “Come here, Mark,” Efrain said, pointing his flashlight into the crevice. The rock was charred and the ground strewn with the remnants of a fire. “Mountain people are very traditional. They come here to make offerings when the INC is away.” In the embers I saw candy wrappers, seashells and an empty wine bottle.

  “This is the cheapest stuff,” Efrain said, picking up the bottle. The label said VINO FORTIFICADO—the Peruvian equivalent of Wild Irish Rose. “Supposedly they’re paying it to the Mother Earth, but they drink the wine themselves.” He poked the ashes with a stick. “A llama fetus is a very good offering. Sometimes you can find little metal shapes that represent things, like a new house or people getting married.” I’d seen these for sale in the market in Cusco. They looked like tiny Monopoly pieces.

  We entered the Torreon, which, if less beautiful than the one in Machu Picchu, was more obviously utilitarian. Efrain pointed out two small windows much like those in the more famous sun temple tower. “June twenty-first is approaching, right, the solstice? The stars move counterclockwise. Right up there is the Corona Borealis. You see it?” The size of the night sky was—sorry, but there’s really no other word for it—astronomical. “The Incas had specialists who kept track of the stars. On the winter solstice you can see the Corona from this window, which points northeast.” He traced his fingers around the window to the left. I looked at the constellation through the thick stone frame. “By the summer solstice on December twenty-second, the Corona has moved to that window on the right.”

  “Wow, I don’t think I’ve read about that anywhere,” I said, half hoping Efrain might direct me to a printed source. He kept a running bibliography on every topic that we touche
d on, from Inca weaving to Bingham’s skill as a photographer, and I’d already written down the names of half a dozen books that he thought I should read.

  “A lot of people don’t believe things they can’t read in a book,” he said. “So many of the things I’ve learned in the mountains—like how to navigate by the stars—can’t be found in books.” The clear night air was freezing, and the stars’ brilliance deepened as the minutes passed. “What you might know as the constellation Scorpio, mountain people call the Condor. When you see those really thin clouds—I forget the name in English.”

  “Cirrus?”

  “Those kinds of clouds mean that there’s going to be frost. If you hear all the frogs singing, you can be sure it’s going to rain. If the birds put their nests near the water, it’s going to be a dry season. These are the sorts of things that fathers teach their sons.”

  We wandered through the alleyways of Patallacta, then crossed back over the river to the cook tent, which glowed in the dark like a jack-o’-lantern. The six porters were huddled inside, laughing about something.

  I’d been wondering something ever since Juvenal and Justo had complained about Mateo’s snoring. “Do these guys ever get sick of sleeping all together?”

  “No way,” Efrain said. “If you made an offer to a team of porters or muleteers—‘Here, we’ll give you a tent for two people’—they’d always say, ‘No, thank you, we’d rather sleep together.’ They stay warm, review what happened during the day, and make fun of everybody.” Someone shouted something in Quechua, followed by a loud laugh. Efrain stifled a smile.

  “Like the clients, for example,” I said.

  “Good night, Mark,” he said. “I hope you sleep well.”