Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [76]
I looked over at my companions. Edgar was still snoozing under the Land Cruiser. Justo was trying to persuade a stray dog to eat a tub of rancid margarine. Then I looked across the campsite into Katie’s capacious cook tent. A man in chef’s whites and a French toque was chopping onions into microscopic pieces. The table probably resembled what Bingham saw at Huadquiña: eight seats, cloth napkins, multiple pieces of cutlery at each place setting. I may never master the machete, but a cocktail party? That’s my natural habitat. My mind wandered off in a reverie of ice cubes clinking into glass drinking vessels. Who knows, maybe they even had . . . coasters.
I savored the caramel bite of an imaginary bourbon on the rocks for a few seconds. But I knew that I would never set foot in that tent. I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium pentothal. Having Justo watch me eat another cook’s food would have felt like taking part in a live sex act in Amsterdam. But most of all, I realized, I had something I’d rather do.
“I really wish I could,” I told Katie. “But I already have an engagement.”
John was right about Fructoso and his wife, as he was about almost anything that wasn’t an usnu—they were fantastic people. Their hut was smaller than some air-conditioning units I’ve seen in my neighborhood, so between John and me and the Fructosos and their two adult sons, we were quite cozy in spite of a cold rain that had started just after the sun went down. Fructoso apologized profusely for not having been around to carry our packs, and his wife plied us with gigantic mugs of coffee and bowls of choclo and a fresh-picked avocado the size of a cantaloupe for each of us. Maybe it was all the organic food they ate, but the whole family seemed to glow with positive energy.
When John inquired how their honeybees were doing, Fructoso stood up and asked excitedly, “You want some honey?” Before we could politely decline, he dispatched one of his sons to fetch some. The son returned with a ten-gallon bucket filled almost to the top with honeycombs. “Eat! Eat! It’s fresh! It’s fresh!” Fructoso’s wife said encouragingly, clapping her tiny hands. John eagerly stuck his hand in and yelled, “Yagh!”
The honey was fresh all right. It still had bees in it.
THIRTY-TWO
A Good Walk Spoiled
At Llactapata
The revised plan was that John and I would walk up to Llactapata alone. Justo and Edgar would drive our packs around to meet us at the Hidroeléctrica train station, where we could catch the train to Aguas Calientes, the tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu. We left at dawn.
About halfway up the mountainside, we encountered a snake in our path, our fourth of the journey by my count. This one was different, because it was alive. John pinned it to the ground with his bamboo pole. “Quick, Mark, take a picture,” he said as the snake squirmed angrily to free itself. I leaned in close to get a good shot, then dropped to one knee to zoom in for a few seconds of action video.
“Got it,” I said, slipping the camera back into my pocket. “So what was it—another one of those false coral garter snake things?”
“Actually . . . no. Did you notice the diamond shape on its head? That means it was probably poisonous.” (When I e-mailed the photos to John later, he confirmed that it was a Bothrops pit viper—which “probably kills more people than any other snake in the Americas.”)
An hour later, the slope began to level off. “Bingham saw almost none of what you’re going to see,” John said, parting some branches near the top of the hill. “He was in too big a hurry.” Indeed, Bingham had spent less than a day at Llactapata, both because he was in his usual rush to find the next big thing and because his porters were threatening mutiny. He had poked around, sketched out his customary excellent diagrams of a few buildings, decided that he’d seen “the