Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [24]
We would need the better part of two days to reach Choquequirao. John said that we were a little less than six miles as the crow flies from the ruins, but we had more than twenty miles of ground to cover on foot. The map I consulted at breakfast made clear that this would be a very long and winding road; the trail zigzagged like it had been blazed with an oscilloscope. And that was just the horizontal part—the easy part.
“Today, we’ve got about five hundred feet up, then three quarters of a mile down to the river by lunchtime,” John said as we waved good-bye to Octavio. “Then we’ll cross the Apurimac River and start the climb to Choquequirao.” That climb would be another vertical mile up. A Peruvian archaeologist with whom I’d lunched in Cusco, who had spent months working at Choquequirao, couldn’t believe that I planned to walk there voluntarily. “You’ve got to hire a horse, Mark,” he pleaded. “I can make some phone calls. It’s not too late.” Bingham had had a similar experience; at a dinner party the night before his departure from Cusco, a fellow guest told him that the walk had “nearly killed him.”
John insisted that the hiking would get easier as we went on, because my body would adapt. “There’s a general law in life,” he said. “The body and mind only get stronger when they’re traumatized.”
It occurred to me, not for the last time, that this was probably not the sort of thing one heard a lot on the Inca Trail.
We quickly fell into what became our daily rhythm. We hiked for a couple hours, until we’d sweated through our shirts. Mid-morning, we stopped to consume some of the fifteen hundred calories’ worth of snacks that Justo packed for us in brown paper bags each morning (mostly fruit, cookies and candy), then soldiered on until lunch. The muleteers stayed behind to finish packing up camp, then passed us on the trail around snack time. Justo usually led the mule parade, carrying a huge pack and a transistor radio, the tinny Andean tunes making him seem even more like a windup toy. Juvenal and Julián followed in succession. Mateo brought up the rear, yelling, “Moo-lah! Moo-lah! Moo-lah!” (He was saying “mule” in Spanish, but he sounded like the slightly unhinged TV pitchman for a state lottery.) By the time John and I caught up to them, Justo had lunch ready and a table set for two. Each of the four men greeted me differently. Justo called me Señor Mark, or Don Marco, the title “Don” in Peru being roughly equivalent to “Mister” in the old South. Mateo greeted me as Papi, or Pops. Juvenal, who had probably done a thousand of these trips in his life, just called me usted, the formal Spanish version of “you.” Julián hid whenever he saw me.
Walking downhill was more complicated, and taxing, than I’d imagined. It takes a lot of energy to stop oneself from sliding down a dusty path littered with rocks the size and shape of marbles. I had to plant my foot and cut hard in the opposite direction at each switchback, like a ball carrier trying to slip past the free safety. The altimeter watch I’d purchased indicated that we were dropping a hundred feet with every turn. The dirt changed color as we descended, from brown to black to red. High sierra scrub gave way to dry, subtropical vegetation, dominated by Seussian cacti shaped like gigantic asparagus stalks. We passed ravines like the one Bingham had jumped across, spanned by packed-dirt bridges. Each one had a single wobbly handrail and a bilingual sign that warned NO SE APOYA/DO NOT LEAN. Most of the signs and railings had tumbled down the hillside.
The Peruvian tourist board has been pushing Choquequirao as “The Other Machu Picchu” for a few years. Part of their strategy is to divert some of the throngs who crowd the more famous ruins. I’d heard reports from a couple of adventure travel snobs that the path to Choquequirao had become “infested” by overflow crowds from Machu Picchu. On our