Those snow-capped peaks in an unknown and unexplored part of Peru fascinated me greatly. They tempted me to go and see what lay beyond. In the ever famous words of Rudyard Kipling there was ‘Something hidden! Go find it! Go and look beyond the ranges – Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’

Hiram Bingham, 1909

The native in front of us stopped suddenly and pointed out the ruinas. With horror we all came to our senses. He was pointing at some scattered stones on the side of the mountain. We were frozen in our tracks with shock. Had we come all this way and made all this effort to be shown a few stones imbedded in a rock?

Julian Tennant, ‘Quest for Paititi’ expedition, 1953

Look for roads. Then follow them.

Gene Savoy (discoverer of Old Vilcabamba,
the ‘last city of the Incas’, in 1964)
giving advice to explorers

Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape and a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955

In this new world of the Indies, as they knew nothing of letters, we are in a state of blindness concerning many things.

Pedro Cieza de León, 1553