Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [21]
Maria, the assistant office manager at Amazonas Explorer, approached carrying two oxygen tanks. Did we want the large one or the small one?
“Let’s think about that for a second,” John said, looking at me. “We’ll take the . . . small one.”
Juvenal Cobos entered the room, two hours late, shook hands all around and eased himself into a chair. He was seventy-four years old, a great-grandfather. He took one look at the pile of stuff on the floor and exhaled loudly. “We’re going to need more mules,” he said. Juvenal and John argued for about ten minutes in Spanish with Juvenal repeatedly hinting ciertas cosas—certain things—needed to be considered in the final price. John wanted that teniamas un acuerdo, we had an agreement. I finally figured out that they were haggling over the muleteers’ daily wage. Juvenal was angling for an extra seventy cents a day per man.
“If it’ll help keep the peace, I’m happy to pay the difference,” I told John. “Four mules, five mules—let’s just get off on the right foot.”
“It’s your money,” John said. “I just want what’s fair and reasonable.”
Mule business settled, we walked over to the kitchen to meet Justo, our cook. The Quechua are a small people. Children in Aurita’s extended family have long looked forward to the day that they stand taller than Nati, a rite of passage that in Alex’s case occurred just after his tenth birthday. Skeletons that Bingham’s team found showed that the average height for workers at Machu Picchu was about five feet, a measurement that hasn’t budged over the five intervening centuries. But Justo was short even by Andean standards, about four feet six. He looked like an anime version of Ricardo Montalban, if the star of Fantasy Island had capped his front teeth with gold and been left in the clothes dryer on high heat for a couple of years. John called him “Hummingbird,” because Justo was constantly in motion and talked nonstop.
“Nice to meet you Señor Mark nice to see you Señor John could you pass me that ketchup thank you do you like yogurt we’ve got yogurt have some tea.”
“He averages about fifteen thousand words a day,” John said as Justo fluttered around the kitchen opening and closing drawers and cabinets, his chatter never pausing. “I’ve counted.”
ELEVEN
On the Road
Westbound on the Capac Ñan
Justo was still talking the next morning as he and I made the rounds at a market outside of Cusco, plotting to commit a Class B felony. As the paying client, I was obligated to provide the Peruvian team members with as much coca as they could chew. The bulging plastic sack that we purchased—roughly the dimensions of a family-size bag of Doritos—would earn me a mandatory five years to life in the States for possession with intent to distribute. In the highlands it was just the final item on the shopping list. Tea brewed with coca leaves is served everywhere in Peru—it’s supposed to mitigate the symptoms of soroche, or altitude sickness. I’d sampled it on a few occasions without ever feeling the urge to dance the night away.
There were five of us in the Land Cruiser: John, me, Justo, Juvenal and Edgar, our driver. We followed the route of the old Capac Ñan, the great Inca highway. In the glory days of the Inca empire, which lasted less than a century, this system of roads was one of the marvels of the pre-Columbian world. Stretching more than ten thousand miles in length, the Royal Road, as the Spaniards dubbed it, was the nervous system of the empire.
Peru is diligent about protecting its most famous archaeological treasures. There’s an entire branch of the government, the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, or INC, charged with overseeing the maintenance of places like Sacsahuaman. With the exception of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, though, the old Capac Ñan is disappearing beneath asphalt like the road we were driving on. The loss is doubly sad because the trails were built to last forever, over some of the