Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Pilgrims’ Progress

  On the Inca Trail

  Not far from Patallacta,” Bingham wrote in his last article for National Geographic, “we located the remains of an old Inca Road leading out of the valley in the diN rection of Machu Picchu.” As we picked up that same trail in the morning, a positive sign appeared overhead—two condors soaring above the mountain into which Patallacta had been built. I had read—and Efrain confirmed—that condors, which were becoming rare sights in the Andes, were traditionally believed to be apus that had transformed into animals. This was my third trip to Machu Picchu, and I had yet to catch even a glimpse of the great apu Salcantay. It was as if a twenty-thousand-foot peak was avoiding me. Maybe one of the condor pair was the elusive mountain, on a reconnaissance mission to check me out.

  On a purely practical level, the Inca Trail doesn’t make much sense. Anyone in a hurry to travel from Cusco or Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu—even someone borne on the shoulders of his subjects in a golden litter—could have more easily followed the original route Bingham took, next to the Urubamba River. The Inca Trail hooks around at a right angle, like a giant check mark. It is not a path designed to minimize effort. Just after starting out, we passed a large wooden sign carved with what looked like a stock price chart. It was a graph of the trail’s changing elevation. Today’s walk, which gained almost a mile in altitude, rose like the dot-com bubble of 1998; tomorrow’s moderate ups and downs looked like normal market turbulence; our fourth and final day on the trail nosedived like the sort of crash that had investors leaping from windows.

  “Better use the new heart monitor today,” John said as he wrote the numbers down in a little blue notebook.

  The path changed from dirt to stone. As we approached a long set of stairs disappearing into the trees above, we caught up to our first fellow hikers. They were stragglers from a big group up ahead, a chubby Frenchman wearing an iPod, and a skinny blond American woman.

  “I . . . really . . . thought . . . I was . . . in shape,” she panted. “But I guess . . . I’m not.”

  “Zey did not . . . tell us so many . . . zee steps,” shouted the Frenchman, sounding offended, over his personal disco soundtrack.

  John pulled alongside the pair. “Now what you’ll want to do is slow down and breathe deeply. Are you on the four-day or the five-day itinerary?”

  “Four days,” the pair said.

  “Right, then. Slow and steady. Don’t sprint and then stop; you’ll waste energy.” Once we’d passed them by fifty yards or so, John shook his head and said, “They’ll be lucky to get to camp by nine o’clock, those two. What a miserable way to hike the Inca Trail. Hardest part’s still up ahead. Then they’ve got an entire valley to cross after they pass the spot where we’ll be stopping for the night. I bet we’ll see some porters coming back this way soon.”

  “What can the porters do?”

  “Give them some support, pulling with an arm on each side to start. If that doesn’t work they have to push.” He mimed a thrusting gesture that coming from almost any other male on the planet would have been lewd.

  When we arrived at the prearranged lunch spot, I got my first glimpse of how crowded the trail can be. At least two hundred people, dressed in all the unnatural colors of the moisture-wicking-apparel rainbow, were picnicking. It looked like Woodstock for people with gym memberships. Most of them ate and ran. We were left in peace for the remainder of the afternoon, chewing wads of coca and climbing shaded steps through an eerily quiet valley that Bingham had described as “destitute of even animal life.” We slept, fitfully, at a high-altitude site called Llulluchapampa.

  By eight the next morning we were walking up a steep, narrow staircase of broken stone steps, climbing toward the day’s first light. We were approaching Dead Woman’s Pass, the highest spot on the Inca Trail. Two steps from the top, nothing was visible ahead but blue sky. At the summit, the vista opened up to reveal a view like the one at Choquequirao that left Bingham reciting lines from Kipling. Mountain ranges extended for miles like ocean waves.

  “This is phenomenal,” I said to John, who was videotaping the view.

  “When you walk through here you realize that this was the only possible route for the Inca to take to Machu Picchu,” he said.

  John was speaking aesthetically. There’s a school of thought that the Inca Trail had been plotted like a good adventure yarn, with twists and turns, rising and falling action, and foreshadowing of the big climax: Machu Picchu. It’s a suspenseful tale broken up by surprises. Looked at from a different angle, the Inca Trail is like the narrative of Alice in Wonderland—dreamlike and open to interpretation. In which case crossing Dead Woman’s Pass was the moment we fell down the rabbit hole. Things only got stranger from this point forward.

  “Come on, I want to show you something,” Efrain said. We walked down the stairs for a couple minutes, until we were in the shadows again, then turned back toward the sunlit pass. “From here, you can see why they call it Dead Woman’s Pass. There’s the face, the breast, the belly.” It really did look like a woman on her back, her strong facial features aimed skyward.

  The trail descended steeply for a while, but John slowed down. His stomach was troubling him.

  “Looks like the early score today is Giardia 1, Leivers 0,” I said when he caught up.

  “More like Giardia 40, Leivers 2,” he said, leaning hard on his bamboo pole. “Go on ahead. I’ll find you.”

  Efrain and I walked ahead alone. He started humming. I asked him what the tune was.

  “Oh that? It’s called ‘Apu Yaya Jesucristo.’ It’s a song you sing in mountain churches.”

  “What does the name mean?”

  “Basically it talks about how the apus are connected to Jesus Christ.”

  Since this suggested a marriage between Catholicism and what the Vatican would probably deem paganism, I asked if this was the sort of thing one discussed publicly in the Andes.

  “In Peru, we have two religions, futbol and Catholicism. But everybody in Cusco still gives offerings in August.” August 1 is Pachamama Day, a major holiday in Cusco. “I’m Catholic, I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. And I give offerings.” Efrain explained that this was a long-standing tradition in the mountains. If one looked at the most famous paintings in the cathedrals of Cusco, one saw that native painters often combined elements of Catholicism with their traditional beliefs. The Virgin Mary might be painted in the shape of a mountain, or with a snake, or under a moon. “Of course the most famous one is of the Last Supper with the cuy—you know, the guinea pig,” Efrain reminded me.

  According to Efrain, this spiritual hybrid went all the way back to the Spanish Conquest. “Mountain people mix traditional beliefs, Catholicism, and ancestor worship,” he said. “My father died when I was very young. After fifteen years, they had to dig up his coffin. So my mother brought his skull back to our house so he could watch over us. Where did this tradition come from? From the Incas.”

  (I wondered for a moment if Efrain was pulling my leg, but realized that he was far too earnest about Andean traditions to joke about something so important. I later read a news story about a candidate for mayor in a southern Peru town who tried to blackmail his opponent into dropping out of the race by digging up the skull of the man’s father and holding it hostage.)

  I told Efrain that the Catholic priests I’d known in my life were not always the most open-minded individuals regarding spiritual matters. Pantheism wasn’t high on their list of likes. “Are the priests around here okay with this stuff?”

  “They have to learn to balance the two,” he said. “If a priest says anything bad about the apus, two seconds later the church empties out.”

  “What do you make of the whole mystical energy thing, with the crystals and all that?”

  Efrain shrugged his shoulders. “There’s energy in everything, Mark. Remember, you can’t find everything in a book.”

  We stopped at th
e first of Bingham’s 1915 discoveries, Runcu Raccay, which looked like a rounded TV dinner tray, with two side-dish compartments surrounding a circular entrée spot. Efrain stepped inside and tapped the dirt floor with my walking stick. It thudded hollow. “After Bingham came through here, lots of people followed—both Peruvian and not Peruvian—looking for gold.”

  We walked on, and the day grew hot. I looked back occasionally to see how John was faring, but he’d fallen out of view. Almost imperceptibly, the terrain turned to cloud forest. Efrain pointed out curiosities from the plant kingdom. The world’s smallest variety of orchid. A type of moss used as a coagulant in World War II. A poisonous fungus that I told Efrain looked like day-old tripe. He grabbed my forearm. “Please don’t eat that, Mark,” he said.

  Around two o’clock, the trail forked. To the right the road continued. To the left it diverted up a set of steps to what from a distance looked like the Rhine castle of an especially antisocial count, perched on a rock outcrop. The building seemed to levitate, as if the Incas had constructed a granite hovercraft. “Sayacmarca,” Efrain said. “The name means ‘inaccessible town.’”

  We ascended the staircase and found ourselves standing inside an elliptical building, open on one end. Contrary to Bingham’s interpretation—that it was a fortress—Sayacmarca seems to have been designed for two types of viewing. On the far end, a large platform—perfect for an alpaca-and-chicha barbecue—took in the Aobamba Valley and snowcapped mountains beyond. The horseshoe-shaped building we’d entered at the top of the staircase was configured toward the south and west. “Its windows face to the sunset, for the solstice and equinoxes,” Efrain said.

  John arrived at the top of the stairs, shuffling slowly and grunting. His face reminded me of construction workers I’d seen waiting in emergency rooms with their hands wrapped in towels. “Very important site, this,” he said through his teeth.

  After lunch, Efrain and I walked ahead again, passing two small lakes. “You want to see something that probably looks a lot like what Hiram Bingham saw?” Efrain asked. We took a detour through an unspectacular crack in the rock face. This led to a slippery white stone trail that we followed for about five minutes, splashing through a few mud puddles and pushing aside vines and branches. “This place must have been pretty important,” Efrain said when we stopped. “Take a look.”

  We stepped into a two-chambered room carved into a hollow in the mountain. The exquisite stonework had been cut to join seamlessly with a huge overhanging rock like an open clamshell. It was like a slightly less fancy version of the Royal Mausoleum. Niches for holding sacred artifacts were recessed into one wall; the cut-granite stones from another wall had toppled over into a pile. Everything was coated with a thick layer of green moss. A shaft of sunlight shined through a large crack where the roof had once been. Efrain was right. It looked just like one of the buildings in the photographs Bingham had taken in 1911.

  “What was this place?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Efrain said. “A friend of mine told me he found it when he was looking for somewhere to sneak off and smoke marijuana.”

  Our final campsite was at Phuyupatamarca, which was Bingham’s last discovery in 1915. The name, given by the anthropologist Paul Fejos, means “town above the clouds.” The porters had set up my tent in what may be the greatest sleeping spot on the Inca Trail—a small ledge just large enough for one person, with a 180-degree view of mist-shrouded peaks. The cold air was heavy with moisture. John arrived about twenty minutes behind us, grumbling about a group of hikers who had set up their dinner tables on the viewing platform directly above us. “Not only are they blocking the way of anyone else who wants to go up there,” he said. “They’re facing away from the mountains. Idiots.”

  At dinner, everyone was wiped out. After all the day’s ups and downs, we were still at about twelve thousand feet. The water for pasta took thirty minutes to boil. I asked Efrain how long it had taken him to get used to sleeping in a tent. He shook his head. “There’s nothing like your own bed at home,” he said.

  “I’ll come by and wake you up after sunrise,” he told me as he stood up to leave. “If it’s clear, the view should be very good. Maybe you’ll even see Salcantay.”

  John popped his last pill of the day. “We’ll be at Machu Picchu by this time tomorrow.”

  “Yep. Pachacutec’s country estate.”

  “Oh, come on, Mark. That theory is fine—and probably correct as far as it goes—but you know it doesn’t do justice to what Pachacutec was trying to do here. Machu Picchu was like Mecca, like the cathedral at the end of a pilgrimage.” That word again. “These experts all have the same problem Bingham had.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Failure of imagination. Too many people think like scientists—mechanically. We’ve barely scratched the surface here. To really understand Machu Picchu I think you’d need to be someone who could come in with a completely open mind—someone more spiritual and religious. Maybe even arty.”

  John wasn’t alone in thinking this. As I’d been packing to leave New York for Cusco this time, I came across a new theory attempting to explain why Machu Picchu had been built. Giulio Magli, a professor of archaeoastronomy at the Polytechnic Institute in Milan, Italy, had just published a paper that expanded on Johan Reinhard’s sacred center theory. Magli argued that the Inca Trail wasn’t just a special VIP access road to Machu Picchu; the two were designed as a single work—a pilgrimage route. This sacred passage had been constructed as a replica of another mythical journey, the one which the very first Incas had made from the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca. According to this story, these forefathers had been created on the island and had traveled through a subterranean void, emerging at the far end of their journey at a place called Tampu Tocco.

  Having walked most of the Inca Trail, I found Magli’s case compelling. As Reinhard had pointed out, the sites along the trail are so different, and so obviously oriented toward watching the sun and stars, that it seems impossible that they didn’t have some important ritual use. Magli believed that the trail likely prepared pilgrims for the most important part of the journey, which took place inside Machu Picchu. Curiously, the final leg of this pilgrimage roughly mimicked another famous journey, Hiram Bingham’s first visit to Machu Picchu in 1911. In both cases, one entered through the main gate, which faced due north to Huayna Picchu (and where Bingham found his rounded stones—which Magli thought had possibly been offerings), walked up past a quarry more symbolic than functional (representing the Pachamama and the journey underground), through the Sacred Plaza, where the Temple of the Three Windows was erected as a tribute to the cave at Tampu Tocco, and up to the Intihuatana, the end point of the pilgrimage, which Reinhard has demonstrated aligns with apus in the cardinal directions.

  By Magli’s reasoning—and he admitted that due to the lack of hard evidence at Machu Picchu, we’re never going to be able to make more than an educated guess about this stuff—Bingham’s Tampu Tocco theory was wrong. The way I saw it, though, Bingham had also sort of been right. Blinded by ambition, he might have mistaken a handsome three-windowed copy of Tampu Tocco for the real thing. Bingham seems to have made the identical mistake with the Torreon. “If my theory about Tampu Tocco is correct,” he’d written in Lost City of the Incas, the Koricancha in Cusco “had been built during the reign of the Incas as an echo, on a large scale, of the semicircular temple at Machu Picchu.” In his haste to tie up all loose ends, he’d gotten things exactly backward. It was as if he’d seen the Last Supper painting in which Jesus gives the benediction over a platter of roasted cuy and proceeded to argue that it must have inspired Leonardo da Vinci.

  FORTY-NINE

  The Who’s Who of Apus

  At Phuyupatamarca

  I got up around 4:30 A.M., feeling oddly refreshed. After I spent an hour reading and shoving things in my pack, the day’s first light started to glow weakly through the thin ceiling of the tent. I I stepped out onto my private t
errace and, with the aid of my ridiculous wristwatch-altimeter-compass, looked roughly in the direction of Machu Picchu. Not much was visible in the obscurity. (Though I did notice that the barometric pressure was rising.) I ducked into the cook tent to grab a cup of coffee. After a few minutes the cloud cover began to lift. Dawn started to break somewhere behind the ranges. It seemed like a good moment to visit the observation platform where the mountain-averse idiots had eaten their dinner the night before. John would really love this, I thought, and momentarily considered waking him before I remembered his stomach troubles. With Nescafé in hand, I exchanged good mornings with the porters sitting outside and turned the corner around the big orange tent, watching my feet as I navigated the cords staked into the ground.

  When I looked up, I was face-to-face with a white deity: Salcantay.

  No wonder people had been talking about this mountain since forever. In the middle of some of the world’s tallest peaks, it completely dominated the skyline. I hurried up the path to the platform for a better look. The first thing I saw at the top was the back side of a familiar form, wearing a ski cap and videotaping everything in a slow semicircle.

  “Best views in the world and no one’s here!” John shouted when he saw me. The panorama was staggering. Almost everything I’d seen in Peru in the last year was visible from this one spot.

  “Look at this, Mark! It’s just sensational! There’s Salcantay, of course. You’ll notice a piece missing from that side. That’s the part that caused the alluvion when it fell into the Aobamba River and wiped out the railway.” It looked like someone had taken the tiniest nibble of a snow cone. “To the right is Pumasillo—you might just be able to make out the Choquetacarpo Pass that we crossed. Over there, behind that mountain, is Choquequirao. And if you come over here . . .” We turned to the right and walked to the edge of the platform. “Over there is Llactapata, and beyond that are Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa. And you might recognize that small, green pointy peak down there.”