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By Root 360 0

impressions of Machu Picchu, any thoughts of the controversies fell away. Far more interesting was the story of how he had gotten to Machu Picchu in the first place. I’d heard that Bingham had inspired the character Indiana Jones, a connection that was mentioned—without much evidence—in almost every news story about the explorer in the last twenty years. Sitting in the neo-Gothic splendor of Yale’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Room, the Indy-Bingham connection made sense for the first time. Bingham’s search had been a geographic detective story, one that began as a hunt for the Lost City of the Incas but grew into an all-consuming attempt to solve the mystery of why such a spectacular granite city had been built in such a spellbinding location: high on a secluded mountain ridge, in the misty subtropical zone where the Andes meet the Amazon. Fifty years after Bingham’s death, the case had been reopened. And the clues were still out there to be examined by anyone with strong legs and a large block of vacation time.

“What’s your take on Bingham?” I asked John.

“Bit of a martini explorer,” he said, employing what I later learned was a euphemism for a traveler who fancies himself tough but who really expects a certain level of comfort. “Not very popular in Peru at the moment. But you can’t argue with the things he found.”

Like every serious explorer in Peru, John had all but memorized Bingham’s published accounts of his 1911 expedition. During that summer, Bingham had made not one but three incredible archaeological discoveries, any one of which would have cemented his reputation as a world-class explorer. In his spare time during that visit, he had managed to squeeze in the first ascent of Peru’s twenty-thousand-foot Mount Coropuna, thought at the time to be the highest unclimbed peak in the Western Hemisphere. Bingham found so many ruins during his three major Peru expeditions that many had since been reclaimed by the wilderness. John had helped organize an expedition a few years earlier to rediscover a site that Bingham had found within view of Machu Picchu, which had gone missing again for ninety years.

As John sipped his coffee, I floated my idea to him. I wanted to retrace Bingham’s route through the Andes on the way to discovering Machu Picchu. I also wanted to see three other important sites that he had visited: the mountaintop citadel of Choquequirao, now considered by many to be Machu Picchu’s twin city; Vitcos, site of one of the holiest shrines in the Inca empire; and Espiritu Pampa, the long-lost jungle city where the Incas made their last stand against the Spaniards. Exactly how we were going to accomplish this—buses? trains? llamas?—was a detail I hadn’t thought through very well.

“Maybe we could hike the Inca Trail,” I said. “That way I could get a taste of Bingham’s experience, you know, following the road that leads to Machu Picchu.” I had mixed feelings about the Inca Trail. For trekkers, hiking it was like making the hajj to Mecca; you had to do it once in your life. But every story I’d read about the Inca Trail—and when you work at an adventure travel magazine, you read a lot of stories about the Inca Trail—made it sound as crowded as the George Washington Bridge at rush hour. The best parts of Bingham’s books were those sections describing Peru’s natural beauty, and I was hoping to get a sense of Peru as Bingham had seen it, if such a thing still existed.

“You know, Mark, all Inca roads lead to Machu Picchu,” John said. He reached across the cluttered tabletop for a jam jar. I couldn’t help but notice how different our hands were. His had square-cut nails and looked like they’d spent a lifetime hauling lines on a trawler. Mine looked like I’d just visited the salon for a mani-pedi. “If this is Machu Picchu”—here he placed the jar at the center of the table—“and this is Choquequirao”—he aligned the sugar bowl—“then these are Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa.” He moved the salt and pepper shakers into position. The four pieces formed a Y shape with Machu Picchu at the bottom.

“There are no roads to most of these