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Once again, Bingham followed almost to the letter the Royal Geographical Society’s Hints to Travellers three-step process for “obtaining a record of monument.” (Draw a floor plan; shoot pictures; and take copious measurements and descriptive notes.) The explorer sketched the three-windowed building into his small leather-covered notebook. Then he pulled out his camera and tripod and began to document his find, taking care to jot down the details of each shot. While inspecting the temple’s interior, he noticed that something had been scrawled on one of the walls: “Lizarraga 1902.” Lizarraga, he later learned, was a farmer who rented land farther down the Urubamba Valley.

As the sun began its downward descent, Bingham tried to digest everything he’d taken in. The boy had one more surprise, though. At the site’s very highest point—a spot that Bingham would learn the next day was, incredibly, visible from the very mule road that he had been following—stood a large rock carved like a sundial. It had a wide base and a squarish twenty-inch-tall gnomon, shaped like a flat-topped obelisk. Such an Inca carving, Bingham knew from Markham’s writings, must be an intihuatana. Bingham stationed Sergeant Carrasco and the boy guide next to the carved rock and snapped a photograph, the template for a century’s worth of souvenir photos.

With darkness coming on quickly, Bingham returned to the Richarte hut to collect Arteaga and make the descent to Mandor Pampa. The first recorded visit to Machu Picchu lasted less than five hours.

THIRTY-FOUR

Going Up

At Machu Picchu

If you’ve ever thought, The new Times Square is delightful but would be even better if it were more claustrophobic and nearly impossible to leave, then Aguas Calientes is calling your name. Otherwise, you’d probably find the town—also known as Machu Picchu Pueblo—about as seedy as the old Times Square, another destination where the typical visitor just wanted to rent a bed for a few hours. Like a bloodhound, John sniffed out a couple of ten-dollar rooms. (A person can easily spend two hundred dollars a night on accommodations. Rooms up at the site-adjacent Machu Picchu Sanctuary Lodge, which is like an Embassy Suites with no pool or parking lot but a great location, start at eight hundred dollars.) The nice señora who ran the hostel pressed stacks of business cards into our hands each time we entered or exited, begging us to tell our friends about her place.

I was a little nervous about visiting Machu Picchu. See, I’d already been to Machu Picchu once, when I’d brought my son Alex to Cusco. We did the typical day trip, which entails a long (three and a half hours each way), very expensive train ride from the outskirts of Cusco in a frigid car at dawn. After dropping another fifty bucks each on entry fees and bus transport, we arrived at one of the wonders of the world at midday to find it as hot and humid as a terrarium, overrun by plagues of stinging flies and Europeans on holiday. (It was August.) Having shelled out almost four hundred dollars just to get us there from Cusco, I was in no mood to spend another thirty dollars on a guide, which was a mistake since Machu Picchu has almost no explanatory signs. The buildings were impressive, but not much more so than what we’d already seen that week at Sacsahuaman and Ollantaytambo. I experienced a little of the deflation that other friends had felt when they arrived at the Great Pyramid and saw that the Sphinx could scratch itself against the skyscrapers of Cairo, or made the pilgrimage to Graceland and discovered that Elvis’s stately pleasure dome was no larger than a Memphis McMansion.

When I admitted this to John, he looked like he might slap me. “Your problem was that you and Alex only allowed yourselves four hours—four hours to see Machu Picchu!—and you didn’t have a strategy ,” he told me over an early breakfast. “You came at the most crowded part of the day, and like everyone on their first visit, you went straight to the most popular spots.” Out of his backpack he pulled a thick folder of photocopies,