Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [89]
We heard singing. Americans singing. Pairs of students from a study-abroad program began to arrive. I worried that they were going to spoil John’s afternoon. The opposite happened. These kids were perfect ambassadors for the U.S.A.—multiethnic, well scrubbed, extremely polite, completely uncynical and very curious. They latched on to John almost instantly and peppered him with questions.
“What’s the tallest mountain you’ve ever climbed?”
“Why does the Inca flag look like the Gay Pride flag?”
“Is there really treasure hiding out there or is that just in the movies?”
“Would you like half an orange?”
Mostly, they wanted to hear about the Inca Trail. What was it like? Was walking it hard? Was it the most awesome thing ever?
“It’s too bad you don’t like the Inca Trail,” I said to John.
He turned to me, confused. “I never said I didn’t like the Inca Trail. The Inca Trail is fantastic.”
I thought about this for a moment. John was right. I was the one who’d decided that I didn’t want to hike the Inca Trail because . . . why, exactly? Oh right, because it wasn’t hard-core enough for a serious adventurer like me.
“You can see how the Inca Trail leads out through the Sun Gate,” John told his audience. “Up there is Wiñay Wayna—that’s a tambo where the Inca himself stayed on his way to Machu Picchu. Absolutely brilliant. And beyond that is Phuyupatamarca, some fantastic stuff there.”
As I watched John excitedly sketch out the highlights of the trail for the study-abroad kids, I realized that I’d learned just enough on this trip to know how much I didn’t know. It was true that unlike 99.9 percent of the people who come to Peru, I’d taken the time to see not just Machu Picchu but several other wonders of Inca architecture. I’d carried a real man’s backpack long enough to know that I never needed to do it again. As someone with Bingham-like tendencies of my own, who strove to clear his desk at the end of every workday, I’d even developed a fondness for the put-it-up-and-break-it-down rhythms of camping.
At the same time, after walking through the Inca landscape and seeing how their architectural wonders connected to the natural environment—and to one another—I wasn’t any closer to understanding Machu Picchu. Anyone who has ever studied string theory in physics may have some idea of how I felt. You walk into class one day confident that you live in a three-dimensional world. An hour later you walk out with only the faintest grasp of the concept that there are actually nine or ten dimensions and, quite possibly, parallel universes on top of our own.
The cheerful gathering atop Mount Machu Picchu broke up. John and I caught a late afternoon bus back down the Hiram Bingham Highway. We hopped off at the point nearest to the new Machu Picchu museum, housed in a handsome building that almost no one visits because it’s a half mile from Aguas Calientes, at the end of a shadowy dirt road. I was curious to see how the official history would credit Bingham’s achievement.
It doesn’t. Not directly, anyway. Amid the typical museum displays (what the Incas ate; their metallurgical techniques) were two dedicated to undermining any claims that what Bingham had accomplished on July 24, 1911, was in any way special. The one nearest the entrance, labeled MACHU PICCHU: KNOWN TO SOME, explained how plenty of local people had known about the ruins before you-knowwho showed up with his camera. This was indisputable, of course— there were people living at Machu Picchu when he arrived. I did find it a little odd, however, that the brief explanation on the wall referred to the Yale explorer by the single name Bingham, as if he were Pelé or Cher. Or Mussolini.
In the next room hung six portraits of men who had influenced the history of Machu Picchu over the last hundred years. One of the men featured was Albert Giesecke, the University of Cusco administrator who suggested