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“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,