Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time by Mark Adams
Requirements: epub reader, 12.89 MB
Overview: Mark Adams’s ebullient TURN RIGHT AT MACHU PICCHU: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time retraces the journey made a century ago by Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor who “discovered” the now famous city of the Incas and indirectly served as the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Adams joins an Australian adventurer named John Leivers for a trek deep into the Peruvian backcountry, a journey that feels to Adams “like descending into a forgotten world. . . . I half expected to hear the roar of a Tyrannosaurus or the shriek of a pterodactyl.” The book seamlessly joins three narrative threads: the brutal 16th-century conquest of the Incas by the Spanish conquistadors and the subsequent retreat of the rebellious ruler, Manco Inca, into a series of jungle redoubts; Bingham’s 1911 expedition that retraced Manco’s flight; and Adams’s own mishap-filled recreation of Bingham’s trip a century later.
Adams, a long-deskbound editor of adventure travel magazines, soon realizes that he’s ill prepared for the rigors of the journey, and not just in his physical conditioning; between his “microfiber bwana costume” and the bags of candy the porter supplies him, he “could have been trick-or-treating as Hemingway.” Later, after neglecting to observe the “Wear Two Pairs of Socks Rule” known to veteran hikers, he examines his painfully battered feet: “My little toes looked like the sort of meat that ends up in hot dogs.”
Adams paints an engrossing portrait of Bingham, the Honolulu-born missionary’s son who combined ruthless ambition, supreme self-confidence and occasional cluelessness. (The first draft of the article he submitted to National Geographic about his Machu Picchu expedition apparently skipped over the actual discovery, prompting his editor gently to point out that “our readers will want to know how you found it.”) Weighing the charges of antiquities theft that dogged Bingham throughout his career and led to a lawsuit filed by the Peruvian government against Yale University, Adams concludes that Bingham did illegally expropriate artifacts, but also promised to return them one day. (Yale settled the suit in 2010, agreeing to repatriate thousands of items to a museum in Cuzco.) Adams also ponders both the majesty and the riddle of the rediscovered city, with its enigmatic structures and “distant peaks ringing the ruin like a necklace.” Bingham theorized (erroneously, it turns out) that Machu Picchu marked the site of Tampu Tocco, the mythical birthplace of the original Incas. But, as Adams observes in this engaging and sometimes hilarious book, Machu Picchu’s allure rests on the fact that it “is always going to be something of a mystery.” -Joshua Hammer (NY Times)
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