Turn Right at Machu Picchu

Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

by Mark Adams

Dutton

Legend long had it that when Spain conquered the Incas in the 1500s, Incan nobility fled with their riches and women to a city called Vilcabamba. For hundreds of years after, that city, shrouded in mystery in a remote and hard-to-access area of Peru, was often referred to as “The Lost City of the Incas.”

But thanks to the efforts of one persistent adventurer, another city took that title: Machu Picchu.

As veteran travel editor Mark Adams writes in his new book, Machu Picchu — an architectural wonder so popular with travelers that just this week, for the first time ever, Peru put a limit on the number of visitors to the area — was discovered by American explorer Hiram Bingham III 100 years ago, on July 24, 1911.

Bingham was a history professor at Yale whose wife was heir to the Tiffany fortune. His grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, had been a trailblazing missionary who built cathedrals in Hawaii and also founded the school later attended by Barack Obama. Bingham was expected to achieve greatness from a young age and was possessed by an uncommon sense of purpose and drive.

“This was a guy who was using time management techniques 100 years ago. He was hyper-, hyper-focused,” Adams says. “His reason for finding Machu Picchu was to become famous. He saw exploration as a way to get attention.”

Considering its geography, it’s conceivable that Machu Picchu could have remained a local secret indefinitely. Located down a narrow canyon that made it completely inaccessible before a mule road was built just a decade before Bingham’s expedition, the city, according to Adams, required a journey up a 2,000-foot-tall mountain range just to view it from afar.

So when Bingham was led to Machu Picchu, the announcement resonated throughout the world.

“National Geographic ran an entire issue on Bingham’s discovery about a year later, and overnight it went from this completely unknown site to one of the world’s most famous archeological wonders,” Adams says.

Bingham made a strong case for Machu Picchu being the Lost City of the Incas, as well as the birthplace of Incan civilization. Long admired for his discovery, he eventually became a governor and senator from Connecticut, and Adams believes that he was the initial inspiration for Indiana Jones.

In his research, Adams found that a 1954 B-movie starring Charlton Heston called “Secret of the Incas” had initially been based on Bingham’s 1948 book, “Lost City of the Incas.”

Certain scenes in that film and in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” are too similar, he says, for the first not to have influenced the second.

“There’s a famous scene in ‘Raiders’ in the map room, where a beam of light comes through and [it’s used to show a] location. If you look at ‘Secret of the Incas,’ there’s a scene where Charlton Heston has this old Incan mirror. He reflects a beam of light on the wall, and it shows him the location of the famous Inca sun disk. [The scenes] look exactly the same.”

But while Bingham was held in high regard by Hollywood, his theory on Machu Picchu’s origins was doubted by real archaeologists. In time, Yale scholars with access to the artifacts Bingham brought from Peru concluded that Machu Picchu was not the Lost City, but instead had been the country estate of the Incan emperor Pachacutec, who was largely responsible for the greatness of the Incan empire.

About three years ago, Bingham’s name popped into the news twice: once when the government of Peru sued Yale University for the return of items taken by Bingham, and again when an amateur historian in Alaska claimed to find evidence that Bingham had been scooped in finding Machu Picchu by a German explorer in the 1860s. (These events, along with lingering questions about how much help Bingham had on his expeditions, have led to a deterioration in Bingham’s reputation over the past decade.)

Due to its sudden resurgence in the public consciousness, Adams decided to commission a story on Machu Picchu. Spurred on by encroaching middle age and a lack of adventurousness in his life, he decided to take on the piece himself for National Geographic Adventure.

When he traveled to Peru to make arrangements for the re-creation, Adams met an Australian guide named John Leivers, a rugged adventurer type in his late-50s whose spare time activity was traversing the Andes Mountains, machete in hand, searching for ancient ruins.

Leivers, who considered Bingham a “martini explorer,” introduced Adams to a third theory, an alternative to the Lost City and county estate proposals.

“The Sacred Center Theory,” says Adams, “says that the Incas built these buildings — not just in Machu Picchu, but other buildings in the area was well — to be aligned with the sun and the stars.”

The Sacred Center Theory was introduced about 20 years ago by an explorer named Johan Reinhard, who proposed it in scholarly journals.

“This is a theory that has not been generally accepted,” Adams says. “I’ve been reading stories about Machu Picchu for years at my job, and I had never once heard of it. You read a mainstream magazine article about Machu Picchu, and it’ll say, ‘Machu Picchu, commonly known as the country estate of Pachacutec,’ that kind of thing.”

But while most were unfamiliar with it, Leivers — who Adams says knows “more about the Incas than almost anybody alive” — spoke about the theory quite a bit.

“John talked a lot about the solstice, the alignment of the sun, invisible lines that run through the landscape, and how all these Inca sites line up along this line. It’s very, very hard to visualize,” Adams says. “In the book, I compare it to string theory. You can understand a three-dimensional world, but when the physics professor starts talking about a nine- or 10-dimensional world, it takes a little while to wrap your head around.”

When Bingham discovered Machu Picchu in 1911, he only spent five hours in the city itself, spending the rest of his time in other, often equally magnificent areas.

In replicating his trip, Adams took in these sites as well. Since they were so hard to access, he and his crew often had these wonders largely to themselves.

“While everybody knows about Machu Picchu, there are other sets of Inca ruins in the area that are absolutely extraordinary,” Adams says. “Choquequirao is Machu Picchu’s sister site, but you have to walk though a valley that’s as deep as the Grand Canyon [to get there]. That tends to scare away travelers. Vitcos has two parts, one of which is in this enormous old Inca building that’s almost the size of a Walmart, but made out of stone. [Then there’s] Espiritu Pampa. That’s the real Lost City of the Incas. But it’s down in the jungle, and it’s a haul.”

While most tourists to Machu Picchu take trains, Adams and his crew conquered the treacherous slopes of the Andes on foot. Leivers estimated that over the course of their three-week expedition, Adams and his crew walked the equivalent of starting at sea level, scaling Mount Everest, and then walking back down.

But whatever hardships they endured, Adams says that the pleasures along the route made them worthwhile.

“In an area not that much larger than metro Los Angeles, you’ve got 20,000-foot mountains, the Amazon jungle, white water rivers — almost every kind of topography you can imagine,” he says. “There were days when the ground would be frozen and we’d walk up a 15,000-foot mountain pass and be chilled to the bone, and then three hours later we’d be more than a mile lower, having walked down an old Inca staircase, standing in a jungle. It was just mind-blowingly beautiful.”

As Leivers guided Adams, he also pointed out peculiarities in the topography, such as where one mountain peak seemed to align with another, or how a rock faced the sun a certain way. About halfway through the expedition, they arrived at a set of ruins three miles from Machu Picchu at a place called Llactapata. Once there, Leivers took Adams to the end of a hallway.

“He said, ‘OK. If you stand at the end of that hallway and look straight at Machu Picchu, there’s a visible line that cuts through an important piece of granite, and then cuts right through the Sun Temple of Machu Picchu. It’s all on one straight line, and that line is dictated by the point on the horizon where the sun rises on the June solstice.”

This was Adams’ epiphany moment. Suddenly, once he was able to actually see it, the Sacred Center Theory made perfect sense. Machu Picchu had not, he realized, been some emperor’s grand vacation getaway, but rather the center of an elaborate — and incredible — architectural plan meant to align buildings throughout the Andes with the sun and other sacred sites, for strictly spiritual reasons. While it’s not completely clear if the design of Machu Picchu was an offering to the gods, an effort to be closer to them, or fed by some other specific purpose, for the Incas, who worshipped the mountains and the sun, it played a significant role in the overall spiritual aspect of their lives.

“It’s one of those things that kinda makes sense when you read it,” he says, “but when you get out in the field and start seeing how certain things line up with certain other things, then it all clicks into place, and you’re like, ‘Whoa. I see it.’ ”

Now, the other indicators Leivers had been pointing out suddenly made sense, and revelations began to flow.

“The Incas were Pantheists — nature worshippers,” Adams says. “Machu Picchu happens to sit on a piece of land where the Amazon hits the Andes; where there are sacred mountains to the north, south, east and west; and where a very sacred river wraps its way entirely around the mountainside on which Machu Picchu sits. If you had a Geiger counter for sacredness of a piece of land in Peru, the spot where Machu Picchu is would bury the needle.”

For Adams, the significance of the Sacred Center Theory is more than just a historical correction. He believes that for those traveling to Machu Picchu, this newfound knowledge greatly enriches a trip already seen by many as the greatest journey of their lives.

“Ninety-eight percent of people who go to Machu Picchu go because they want to knock an item off their bucket list,” Adams says. “But it was built for a very sacred and important purpose. If you learn about why it was built where it was built, you come away with a much more gratifying experience.”