Turn Right at Machu Picchu

We spent a night in Quillabamba, a small city with some features that struck me as overwhelmingly cosmopolitan after two weeks in the backcountry: two-way traffic, restaurants, couples holding hands. Juvenal unfolded himself from the back of the truck, grasped my hand, said, “Good luck, Marco,” and walked off into the sunset to catch a bus home to Huancacalle, leaving me to wonder if he’d known my name all along. The only memorable moment of our urban respite occurred when a pharmacist with whom I’d been conversing in Spanish made my year by asking whether I was visiting from Madrid. Because I’d learned to speak Castellano in Spain, I had a habit of pronouncing soft C’s with a European lisp that the muleteers found hilarious—a hypothetical order for five beers would come out of my mouth as “theenk-o ther-vay-thas.”

Not long ago, it had been possible to catch the train to Machu Picchu from our next stop, Santa Teresa. Or rather, from what used to be Santa Teresa. The original town was swept away during the El Niño climate craziness of 1998, by a mud slide caused when a chunk of glacial ice cracked off the side of a nearby mountain. A wave of earth and rocks roared down the valley, wiping out an entire train line, burying a power plant and killing at least twenty-two people. When Edgar pulled over on the highway for a relief stop, we looked down into a riverbed where a gentle current flowed over twisted iron rails and smashed train cars.

There are three ways to reach Machu Picchu, two of which are well known—taking the train from Cusco and hiking the Inca Trail. We were stopping in Santa Teresa to check on the train schedules for the “back door” route to Machu Picchu,⁷ a small train shuttle that runs once a day from a hydroelectric plant on the Urubamba River. We’d then spend a day climbing to Llactapata, which has been called the Lost Suburb of the Incas because of its proximity to Machu Picchu. Bingham had found Llactapata during his follow-up Peruvian expedition in 1912. Like a surprising number of his discoveries, it had fallen out of sight for decades—in spite of the fact that it sits just three miles from Machu Picchu and, when cleared of brush, is plainly visible from the more famous site. John had been a member of the team that conducted the first major scientific investigation of Llactapata, in 2003, much of which was based on old coordinates that the explorer Hugh Thomson had found among Bingham’s dusty papers at Yale. John therefore had a proprietary interest. “There’s some fantastic stuff up there,” he told me as we did some last-minute shopping in Santa Teresa. “They’re just beginning to understand how closely related it was to Machu Picchu.”

We drove on through a dry valley to a small cluster of huts at the bottom of a steep slope. John knew some porters we could hire to carry our packs up to a campsite near the top, next to Llactapata. We’d spend a day looking around and then descend to the Hidroeléctrica train station. The afternoon ride to Machu Picchu lasted about forty-five minutes. I’d be wearing clean underwear and sipping a pisco sour by sundown.

Unfortunately, there was no way of contacting these porters in advance. Spring planting season was approaching, and all the men were off helping burn the nearby hillsides. The entire valley resembled one of those segments on the evening news in which Highway One is shut down near Los Angeles because of wildfires. Every hour or so, John would wander up the road to see if any of his strong-backed buddies had returned home. Each time he came back alone.

We set up lunch in a school yard next to a tiny general store. It was a hot, sunny day, and when I was certain John had gone to check on porters again, I splurged on a bottle of cold water for myself and Inca Kolas for Justo and Edgar. The gearbox on the Land Cruiser was making odd noises, so Edgar went off to examine the underside of the chassis.

“I used to do that with Encounter Overland,” John said approvingly when he saw Edgar flat on his back beneath the truck. “Sometimes it’s good for the driver to just get under the vehicle and have a good hard look around, study the patterns until the problem pops out at you.” Edgar had taken this intuitive method of auto repair to another level by closing his eyes and folding his hands over his chest.

After a long day of near-complete idleness, we officially postponed Operation Storm Llactapata in the late afternoon. Justo and I parked our folding table in the valley’s one shady spot, sipped hot tea and tried not to catch each other’s eye. Even he was talked out. The only books I had with me were Bingham’s, and I’d read them all twice. Not for the first time, I thought about how I’d give a hundred dollars for any one of the four copies of Great Expectations buried somewhere in my attic. We all watched some kids play soccer on a dirt field. When the game ended, John headed off again to look for his porter friend Fructoso, whose wife had invited him to come by and wait for her husband. “You should stop by, Mark, they’re fantastic people.” I lied and said I had some postcards to write.

Two boys, maybe six years old, approached and said their teacher had told them to ask us to collect our mules, which were sticking their noses into the classroom windows. I told them we didn’t have any mules. They shrugged their shoulders and walked back to school. When I turned to find out what Justo and Edgar were up to, I saw that perhaps a dozen mules had arrived and were consuming whatever small islands of weedy vegetation remained on the soccer field. The logo of a luxury travel outfitter whose all-inclusive trips I’d checked out online was emblazoned on their gear bags. The tents their muleteers were setting up next to the general store looked like they’d been bleached, starched and ironed. A distinctly American voice, the first I’d heard in weeks, drifted toward me:

“Offer them fifteen-five. You’re authorized to go to seventeen.”

I had overheard enough self-important financial conversations in Manhattan to know what to expect as I walked up the small hill that led back from the school yard. And sure enough, there he was: Mr. Super Deluxe Travel Guy. I recognized his boots as the most expensive kind available; the sales assistant at an outdoorsy shop near my home had recommended I buy them only if I were trying to summit Mount Everest. Solo. Without supplemental oxygen. The American was shouting into a cell phone as he walked around trying to find the spot with the strongest reception.

“What? Can you hear me? I’m in the middle of bumfuck Per-ROO! I may not be able to get a good signal until tomorrow.” He turned to look for his guide. “Antonio! Do they have cell phone service at Machu Picchu?”

“Claro! Of course! Like a crystal!”

Mr. Super Deluxe Travel Guy breathed deeply like he’d taken a hit from his asthma inhaler. “Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow as soon as we get off the bus to Machu Picchu.”

Sitting cross-legged on a rock off to the side was a slim, pretty woman with a ponytail. Her nose was buried in a book. The book happened to have been written by someone I knew, so I asked if she was enjoying it. When she said that she was, I introduced myself and told her a very embarrassing story about the author. She laughed and invited me to sit down. Her name was Katie.

“Any idea what they’re doing up there?” she asked, pointing up at the men lighting the vegetation afire.

“I think they’ve run out of land to plant on. My friend told me that the easiest way to clear the brush off these mountains is to burn it and hope it doesn’t get out of control.”

“Seems a shame,” she said. “It’s so beautiful here, everything is so green. When it’s not on fire, that is. Have you been to Machu Picchu yet?”

“I think we’re going day after tomorrow. You?”

“We’re going tomorrow. I can’t wait. Jason and I have been talking about doing this since we were in college.” Katie glanced at her husband, who was devouring a PowerBar and shouting a string of numbers into his phone as he continued to pace like a Buckingham Palace guard. “I swear I’ve had a Post-it that says ‘go to Machu Picchu’ stuck to my computer screen for about a million years. And finally, we’re here. Did you go to Choquequirao? Isn’t it incredible? I love it here. Of course he’s going crazy because he can’t get Yankee scores or real-time commodities prices.”

“I haven’t been online for a few weeks,” I said. “Have I missed anything?”

“I doubt it. We stopped to check e-mail in Santa Teresa. The biggest news story was about some kid who flew into space holding on to a balloon or something. Except maybe his parents made the whole thing up? It was kind of convoluted.”

After weeks of conversations that had centered on rocks and mules and bowel movements and the occasional tendency of mules to have rocklike bowel movements, a few minutes of urbane adult chitchat felt like slipping into a hot bath with the Sunday New York Times. Katie and I talked about books in which no one freezes to death or falls into a crevasse. We talked about countries we had both visited, and restaurants we had both eaten at, and movies that she had seen and that I hoped to watch someday when my children left for college and I was again able to stay up past eight-thirty at night.

“Hey,” Katie said, “we usually have cocktails before dinner, after we wash up. I’m not sure if I’m authorized to do this, but you know what? I’m paying a fortune for this trip and you definitely look like a man who could use a drink. So stop by if you want. And stay for dinner, too.”

I looked over at my companions. Edgar was still snoozing under the Land Cruiser. Justo was trying to persuade a stray dog to eat a tub of rancid margarine. Then I looked across the campsite into Katie’s capacious cook tent. A man in chef’s whites and a French toque was chopping onions into microscopic pieces. The table probably resembled what Bingham saw at Huadquiña: eight seats, cloth napkins, multiple pieces of cutlery at each place setting. I may never master the machete, but a cocktail party? That’s my natural habitat. My mind wandered off in a reverie of ice cubes clinking into glass drinking vessels. Who knows, maybe they even had . . . coasters.

I savored the caramel bite of an imaginary bourbon on the rocks for a few seconds. But I knew that I would never set foot in that tent. I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium pentothal. Having Justo watch me eat another cook’s food would have felt like taking part in a live sex act in Amsterdam. But most of all, I realized, I had something I’d rather do.

“I really wish I could,” I told Katie. “But I already have an engagement.”

John was right about Fructoso and his wife, as he was about almost anything that wasn’t an usnu—they were fantastic people. Their hut was smaller than some air-conditioning units I’ve seen in my neighborhood, so between John and me and the Fructosos and their two adult sons, we were quite cozy in spite of a cold rain that had started just after the sun went down. Fructoso apologized profusely for not having been around to carry our packs, and his wife plied us with gigantic mugs of coffee and bowls of choclo and a fresh-picked avocado the size of a cantaloupe for each of us. Maybe it was all the organic food they ate, but the whole family seemed to glow with positive energy.

When John inquired how their honeybees were doing, Fructoso stood up and asked excitedly, “You want some honey?” Before we could politely decline, he dispatched one of his sons to fetch some. The son returned with a ten-gallon bucket filled almost to the top with honeycombs. “Eat! Eat! It’s fresh! It’s fresh!” Fructoso’s wife said encouragingly, clapping her tiny hands. John eagerly stuck his hand in and yelled, “Yagh!”

The honey was fresh all right. It still had bees in it.