Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [124]
“Like the clients, for example,” I said.
“Good night, Mark,” he said. “I hope you sleep well.”
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