Mark Adams · 2011 · overland
Mark Adams's 2011 travel memoir. A desk-bound editor sets out to retrace the 1911 route by which Hiram Bingham 'discovered' Machu Picchu, hiking the hard way through the Peruvian Andes with a flinty Australian survival guide. From Cusco over high passes to the ruins of Choquequirao, Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa, the journey through cloud forest and Inca history leads at last to the famous lost city itself.
- 1New York
A magazine editor who has never slept in a tent decides to retrace the route of the man who put Machu Picchu on the map - and hires an Australian explorer called John Leivers to keep him alive while he does it.
- 2Lima
The Peruvian coast and the flight inland, and the reading Adams does on the way: Bingham's own account, and the awkward question of what a Yale lecturer was doing removing several thousand artefacts.
- 3Cusco
The old Inca capital high in the Andes where the author begins, assembling mules and a gruff guide to retrace explorer Hiram Bingham's path to the lost cities of the Incas.
- 4Choquequirao
The remote 'sister city' of Machu Picchu, reached by a punishing climb into the cloud forest - one of the ruins on the winding route Bingham followed a century before.
- 5Vitcos
Rosaspata, and the white rock of Yurak Rumi - a real Inca site that Bingham identified correctly, and one of the places that should have told him Machu Picchu was not what he thought it was.
- 6Espiritu Pampa
Vilcabamba the Old, the last Inca capital and the thing Bingham was actually looking for - which he reached, dismissed as too small, and only understood fifty years after his death.
- 7Llactapata
The ruin across the valley, aligned so that the sun rises over Machu Picchu from it at the June solstice - rediscovered in 2003, and the strongest argument that the site was built to be looked at.
- 8Machu Picchu
The great lost city on its ridge above the Urubamba, the journey's end, where history and myth converge on the most famous ruin in the Americas.