Walking the Inca world Machupicchu

By Mark Adams
The New York Times
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Isolated Incan archaeological sites such as Choquequirao and Espiritu Pampa can still be reached only on foot. Most reputable trip outfitters in Cuzco can assemble a made-to-order trip, including the Amazonas Explorer company (www.amazonas-explorer.com).
Lima-based Aracari (www.aracari.com) also offers trips throughout Peru, including to remote sites. Seattle-based Wildland Adventures (www.wildland.com) and REI Adventures (www.reiadventures.com) offer Inca Trail and other treks in Peru.

As we neared the end of a very long climb up a very steep ridge, my guide, John Leivers, shouted at me over his shoulder. "It's said that the Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, but I disagree," he said. I caught up to him — for what seemed like the 20th time that day — and he pointed his bamboo trekking pole at the strangely familiar-looking set of ruins ahead. "It's this place they never found."

He was pointing to Choquequirao, an Incan citadel high in the Peruvian Andes that so closely resembles Machu Picchu that it's often touted as the sister site of South America's most famous ruins. Both are believed to have been built in the 15th century and consist of imposing stone buildings arranged around a central plaza, situated among steep mountain ridges that overlook twisting whitewater rivers, with views of skyscraping peaks.

But there's no question which sibling is more popular.

An estimated 3,000 people make their way through Machu Picchu's corridors on a typical day. Between breakfast and lunch at Choquequirao, I counted 14 people, including myself, Leivers and a few scattered archaeologists.

The first known American to see Choquequirao was the young Yale history lecturer Hiram Bingham III, in 1909. Many believed that the ruins had once been Vilcabamba, the legendary lost city of the Incas. Bingham didn't agree and was mesmerized by the idea of lost cities waiting to be found.

Back again

Two years later, Bingham returned to Peru in search of Vilcabamba. In July 1911, just days into his expedition, Bingham climbed a 2,000-foot-tall slope and encountered an abandoned stone city of which no record existed. It was Machu Picchu.

This year, which marks the 100th anniversary of Bingham's achievement, up to a million visitors are expected at Machu Picchu, a sharp rise from last year's roughly 700,000, one of the highest attendance figures ever.

Most of those pilgrims will hear the tale of Bingham's 1911 trip. But few will know the explorer also located several other major sets of Incan ruins, all of which approach his most famous finds in historic significance.

After Machu Picchu — where he lingered for only a few hours, convinced that more important discoveries lay ahead — Bingham continued his hunt for vanished Incan sites. His 1911 expedition turned out to be one of the most successful in history.

Within a few hundred square miles, he found Vitcos, once an Incan capital, and Espiritu Pampa, a jungle city where the last Incan king is thought to have made a final stand against Spanish invaders. A year later he returned, and came upon Llactapata, a mysterious satellite town two miles west of Machu Picchu whose importance is still being decoded.

I wondered if it was still possible to detour from the modern, tourist path and arrive in the same way Bingham had — by taking the scenic route into Inca history. Aided by Leivers, a 58-year-old Australian expatriate who works with the Cuzco-based adventure outfitter Amazonas Explorer, I assembled a trip to do just that.

Rather than start with the most famous ruins, our route began in Cuzco and looped counterclockwise around them, stopping first at the other extraordinary sites. You might call it a backdoor to Machu Picchu.

A typical Machu Picchu package tour lasts a week. But anyone able to stretch that to 2 ½ weeks — and who has sturdy legs — can hike in blissful solitude through roughly 100 miles of some of the world's most varied and beautiful terrain while pausing to gawk at Bingham's greatest hits. (April through October are the driest months to undertake such a trip.)

Best of all, by circumventing the most common approaches to Machu Picchu — the train from Cuzco and the Inca Trail — the backdoor route avoids the Machu Picchu crowds almost entirely.

Wild lands

Though the little-seen wonders surrounding Machu Picchu exist in an area not much bigger than Los Angeles, Peru's crazy-quilt topography and weather patterns have provided them with a grand and amazingly varied setting. My packing list included long underwear and malaria medicine.

Since there were no proper roads to most of our destinations, Leivers had a team of six mules to carry gear and three men to wrangle them, plus a cook. The four men spoke Quechua, the language of the Andes (and Incas), among themselves, and Spanish to Leivers and me.

The zigzagging trail to Choquequirao, our first stop, was only 20 miles long but required crossing a canyon nearly a mile deep. Leivers, who, when he's not giving tours, spends his time hiking alone through the Andes searching for pre-Columbian ruins, described the journey as "a nice walk."

And it was, for the first hour or so, as we hiked a gentle rise toward the 19,000-foot-high snow-capped Mount Padreyoc. After that, the trail plummeted, crossed the Apurimac River, then rose almost vertically for 5,000 switchbacking feet.

For two days I was so focused on keeping up with Leivers' unwavering pace that I hardly noticed the scenery.

And yet, when we finally entered the Choquequirao ruins on the third morning, I knew the effort was been well spent. As at Machu Picchu, beautiful stone terraces led up to a grassy main plaza. The most important structures had been thoughtfully arranged around this green space. We strolled peacefully through gabled buildings, lined with niches designed to hold mummies and sacred idols.

Though Choquequirao was already well-known locally when Bingham arrived, its hard-to-reach location and scale — the main ruins of Machu Picchu are contained in a compact space of perhaps 20 acres, while the structures of Choquequirao sprawl over hundreds of acres — have slowed efforts to reclaim it from the surrounding cloud forest and restore its buildings to something like their original glory.

"Once this is all cleared, Choquequirao will be one of the most spectacular archaeological sites in the world," Leivers said.

As we departed Choquequirao heading north, Leivers calculated that by the time we reached Machu Picchu, we would have climbed and descended elevations almost equal to walking up Mount Everest from sea level and back down again.

"Trust me, your legs will adapt after a few days," he assured me. And they did, during the roller-coaster four-day walk to Vitcos, about 40 miles on foot.

Incan architects specialized in spectacular entrances, and the path leading into Vitcos was one of their masterpieces: a long, narrow walkway that leads to a majestic stone building, once probably a palace. From that approach, rows of mountains unfold in all directions, giving the visitor the sense of stepping onstage in the world's biggest amphitheater.

But while the stonework of the palace doorways, the site's finest examples of imperial Incan masonry, rivals anything in Peru, what drew Bingham — and me — to Vitcos was the White Rock, an extraordinary carved granite boulder the size of a Winnebago. Abstract geometric shapes were engraved into its eastern face. Its backside was cut into smooth tiers, possibly altars.

Into the jungle

From Vitcos, we started the rough, 30-mile-long trek down — way down — to Espiritu Pampa, once an ancient city in the jungle.

"Up there are the Andes," Leivers said, gesturing backward as we crossed a wobbly suspension bridge. "Down there is the Amazon."

Over the course of three sweaty days, we traversed a marshy basin, climbed to a gap where gale-force winds nearly knocked us over, and passed through a misty, desolate zone dotted with green salt pools and into jungle.

Espiritu Pampa, which the Incas hastily abandoned when attacked by Spanish conquistadors in 1572, has a spooky, frozen-in-time feeling (and it is believed to be the lost city of Vilcabamba that Bingham sought).

Enormous matapalo strangler fig trees loomed over its central plaza, their leaves diffusing the sunlight as it fell on dozens of stone buildings, many of which had toppled into heaps.

Toward Machu Picchu

Leivers promised that Llactapata, one of our last stops before Machu Picchu, would provide an excellent illustration of a theory on Inca life and design.

Over the last 20 years, Johan Reinhard, an anthropologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence, has developed a theory the Incas laid out their buildings in relation to the paths of the sun and stars, especially those at Machu Picchu that are believed to have been built in the mid-1400s as an estate for an Incan emperor.

Llactapata has been called the "Lost Suburb of the Incas," because it sits directly across the valley from Machu Picchu and, with a decent pair of binoculars, is visible from it.

Leivers showed me how on the morning of the June solstice — the shortest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the holiest dates on the Incan calendar — one corridor at Llactapata aligns perfectly with the Sun Temple at Machu Picchu and the exact spot on the horizon where the sun rises. The Incas were superb engineers; such an invisible axis couldn't have been a coincidence.

After descending on foot into the canyon that sits between Llactapata and the Historical Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, an 80,000-acre preserve that contains the main site and the Inca Trail, travelers can catch a train to Machu Picchu. Or, as Leivers and I did, they can slip in the rear entrance by walking the last six miles.

One's first view of Machu Picchu is a bit like seeing the "Mona Lisa" after staring for years at a da Vinci refrigerator magnet. You know exactly what to expect, and at the same time, can't quite believe that the real thing exceeds the hype. Also like the "Mona Lisa," Machu Picchu is more compact than it appears in photos.

In less than an hour Leivers and I were able to visit most of the ruins that Bingham saw 100 years ago, in the same order he had encountered them: the cave of the Royal Mausoleum, with its interior walls that seemed to have melted; the perfect curve of the Sun Temple; the titanic structures of the Sacred Plaza; and, at the very top of the main ruins, the enigmatic Intihuatana stone, around which a throng of mystically inclined visitors stood with their hands extended, hoping to absorb good vibrations.

On the last morning of our trip, feeling crowd-shy, I asked Leivers if he knew of any place at Machu Picchu that Bingham had seen but that most people never bothered to visit. "I know just the spot," he said without hesitating. "Mount Machu Picchu."

Climbing the 1,640-foot-tall staircase to the top of verdant Mount Machu Picchu gave us a condor's-eye view of the ruins. It let us, like Bingham a hundred years before, savor Machu Picchu.