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By Root 434 0

to adjust to—even more so than the popularity of Nescafé in a country that grows some of the finest coffee beans in the world—was la hora peruana, Peruvian Time. This is the code, indecipherable to North Americans, by which Peruvians determine the latest possible moment that it is acceptable to arrive for an appointment. The statement “I’ll be right back” can mean just that, or it can mean that the speaker is about to depart via steamship for Cairo. The habit drove Bingham bananas and hasn’t improved over time, despite a widespread government campaign to combat tardiness a few years back. By one estimate, each Peruvian arrives a total of 107 hours late each year, a number that is shocking only because it seems so low. My friend Esteban, an Ivy League–trained businessman living in Lima, needed to lie to his own mother to get her to his wedding on time. He told her the ceremony began at noon when it actually started at 4 P.M. She arrived at ten minutes to four, red-faced and puffing.

Even after ninety minutes of gritty coffee and idle chitchat, I wasn’t too upset, though, because we were waiting for a legend. In terms of exploring in the Andes, getting Juvenal Cobos to lead my team of mules was the equivalent of pasting a flyer up at the local Guitar Center inviting people to a jam session and having Eric Clapton show up in my basement. The Cobos family had worked on virtually every important expedition in the region we were heading to since the 1950s, including two famous attempts to follow up on Bingham’s 1911 search for the Lost City of the Incas. Juvenal was also, John told me gravely, famous for padding the bill with extra mules.

I had noticed three things about John. One, he never removed his hat. Ever. Two, he was a bit of a misanthrope. He often spoke wistfully about a volcanic explosion that had happened 73,000 years earlier, almost wiping humanity off the face of the earth. John thought that Peru was destroying itself through population growth that could be reversed only by a huge flu pandemic, that the long march of civilization had peaked a few years earlier, and that the world had entered a deep, probably irreversible decline. “In some places, I wouldn’t be surprised if we went back to the Dark Ages soon,” he told me. I wondered if the guides who led luxury mystical excursions to Machu Picchu started their tours by scaring the bejeezus out of their clients.

The third thing I’d gathered about John was that he was a little tight with his money. It wasn’t that he was cheap, really, just that his sense of fair play was offended when he felt that something was overpriced, which was often. When I returned to Cusco, we’d eaten lunch in a restaurant that had once been the finest house in Peru, an Inca palace so large, the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega recalled, that sixteen men on horseback could joust inside it. I couldn’t stop staring at the gem-cut stone walls. John gawked at the menu, fixated on the price of a bowl of soup. “Really, what’s in there? Noodles, broth cubes, maybe a little egg. Fifty cents of ingredients sold for five dollars! That’s immoral.”

We sat in the Amazonas Explorer office a few minutes longer, until John finally got impatient. He stood up and started yanking the contents of what appeared to be a mobile field hospital out of two gigantic bombproof suitcases and spread them over the floor.

“Take a seat over here, Mark, you’ll need to know where these things are in case anything happens. Our policy is we avoid all problems. Now, this is for broken bones,” he said, holding up some sort of bendable stiff material that evidently wrapped around a fracture. “Satellite phone—fifty dollars just for the phone card, and that only lasts an hour and expires in a month. Epi pen. God, these things are expensive. They can save your life, though. You have any serious allergies?

“Now we’ll get into the serious stuff. Let’s see. I don’t think we’ll need this many bandages. Metallic blanket for hypothermia. Bronchodilator. You have bronchial problems at altitude, and whew, that’s trouble. Any blood pressure