Peru's Lost City of Gold

by Jonathan Levi | Published March 2009
When Machu Picchu is overrun with tour buses, Choquequirao—just twenty-five miles away and accessible only on foot—is deserted. Jonathan Levi sets off on a five-day trek and discovers the secret of Peru's original El Dorado

Don Nazario Turpo died a stupid death. The driver of the bus in which he was traveling from Saylla to Cuzco didn't realize that the local campesinos were making one of their quixotic low-tech protests—placing stones and tree trunks across the road without warning. Fourteen others besides Nazario died in the crash, and fifty were wounded. I had met Nazario, the pacu, or shaman, of Ausangate, a couple of years before at Machu Picchu. Long after the other tourists had gone, he sat in the quiet of the ruins and told my daughter's fortune. Although pacu translates into English as shaman, the pacu is little different from the priest of any religion who acts as an intermediary between the human and the divine. It's just that in the religion of the Incas—and Nazario, like most Peruvians, was a descendant of the Incas—mountains, rivers, and all the forces of nature are apus, spirits. "I'm coming back to Peru," Rebecca had whispered to me as we walked past grazing llamas in the dusk.

"But not to Machu Picchu," Nazario had said to me the next morning. The impregnable fortress of the Incas had fallen to the forces of mass tourism. Every day, foreigners by the hundreds were arriving from Aguas Calientes on buses belching diesel, and charging down the Inca Trail and through the Sun Gate. They came here guzzling pisco sours on the five-hundred-dollar-a-head Orient-Express Hiram Bingham deluxe day-trip from Cuzco, gazing seraphically at campesinos tilling their fields with hand ploughs—a journey to what is fast becoming one of the world's most endangered gorgeous sites.

Nazario had mentioned another ancient Incan citadel, a name full of guttural q's in the local Quechua language. No one went to this place. But it wasn't until Roger Valencia of the tour operator Auqui e-mailed me with news of Nazario's death that I wrote back to ask if he knew about this sister to Machu Picchu.

"Choquequirao," Roger answered instantly. "Even more beautiful than Machu Picchu. When do you want to go?"

Choquequirao. Choqeqirau. Chokekiraw. I Googled as many variations as I could imagine and came up with very little. I pulled my much abused copy of Lost City of the Incas off the shelf and searched the index. Lost City was written by Hiram Bingham forty years after he had become the first Northerner, in 1911, to "discover" Machu Picchu. Pictures of Bingham in Peru show a certain kind of Yalie who was still in residence several generations later: a Faulknerian dreamer from the provinces (in Bingham's case, Hawaii instead of Mississippi); a man whose height and good looks made him the rumored inspiration for Indiana Jones, and doomed him to a desire for easy conquests. Yet without the inheritance that many of his classmates brandished on their lapels, Bingham realized that he needed to write himself into mythology. "Machu Picchu was to Bingham the crowning of all his purest dreams as an adult child," wrote Che Guevara decades later.

Lost City was full of Choquequirao. Choquequirao, in fact, was Bingham's destination on his virgin trip to Peru in 1909, the city he believed to be the last holdout of the Incas during the dark days of the 1530s, when the Spanish conquistadors of Francisco Pizarro systematically destroyed their empire. City of Gold was how the Peruvians translated the name to Bingham, a guttural El Dorado. The last holdout would hold the last treasure—not to mention the thrill of danger. "In the journey to Choquequirao," Bingham wrote, "it seemed as though our heavily laden mules must surely lose their footing and roll down the fifteen hundred feet to the raging Apurímac River below."

Once Bingham decided that Machu Picchu, in fact, was the City of Gold, Choquequirao faded like a discarded high school girlfriend. But recent archaeologists have cast doubt on Bingham's theories on Machu Picchu. Choquequirao, the original City of Gold, may be getting ready for its red carpet walk.

I called Rebecca. My daughter had already fulfilled Nazario's prophecy, having returned to Peru just after college graduation to teach the local children in the town of Urubamba, up the river from Machu Picchu.

"Sure," she said. "May's good for me, I can take a day off." I replied that there's a reason Choquequirao is so unknown. It takes more than a day to reach it, and even then there's no easy way to do so. I knew some people who had flown in by helicopter, but the winds in the mountains can be vengefully unpredictable. They had nearly crashed. Three times.

"It's a five-day hike," Roger said.

"With mules?" I asked, imagining Bingham's heavily laden companions.

"Leave it me."

And so it was that at noon on an early-May day, after a four-hour drive from Urubamba, Rebecca and I found ourselves at the beginning of the trail, squatting beside a camp stove with our guide, Ana, and our cook, Felicitas, finishing up a lunch of cold chicken and cauliflower. The fifth member of our party, Carlos, our arriero (muleteer), ran after one of our three mules, which had just disappeared off the side of the road.

It was Ana who, several years before, had introduced us to Nazario and invited him on our trip to Machu Picchu. The daughter of a schoolteacher from Cuzco and a Quechua-speaking mother, she had begun guiding visitors into the rain forest of Manu and the Incan villages of the altiplano during the worst of the guerrilla violence of the 1980s. Ana knew a lot of facts—names of plants and trees and birds and historical dates—but even better, she knew a lot of rumors, a lot of folk history, tales of ghosts and apus.

For the first hour, we skipped three abreast on a wide trail. Rebecca and I looked at the broad panorama of Salcantay Mountain and the nearer glacial peak of Padreyoc across the river, and then at each other. This was lovely. Less than twenty miles to Choquequirao. Piece of cake.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.

"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.

"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.

In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.

Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chi­quis­ca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.

The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.

The next morning, we let gravity and alti­plano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.

And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.

"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.

"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.

In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.

Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chi­quis­ca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.

The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.

The next morning, we let gravity and alti­plano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.
And then we turned the corner at the town of Capuliyoc and saw what lay ahead. "There." Ana pointed to a bump on a mountain in the distance. "That's Choquequirao." With the sun directly above, we could just make out what seemed to be a handful of man-made structures in the distant trees. Not quite close enough to touch but almost. "And that," she pointed down, "is the Apurímac." We took her word that the twisting white thread below was a river. Far below. One mile below. This was the canyon of the Apurímac, the true headwaters of the Amazon, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. "And that is our path." A snaky thing. A steep snaky thing, so steep it disappeared at times. And then, across the river, another steep snaky thing. Down one, up the other.

"Daddy . . ." Rebecca began, in a voice I hadn't heard since her eighth birthday.

"I didn't know," I stammered. Bingham's heavily laden mules plunged through my guilt.

In the first hour we discovered at least four ways to get downhill, three of them involving our feet. In the second hour we found that, as narrow and steep as the path was, Carlos and Felicitas and our heavily laden mules were still able to trot along without slipping over the edge. In the third hour, I began to wonder how much this path resembled the one Hiram Bingham had trod a hundred years before. It sliced mercilessly through fields of bloodred wild grass. It slalomed around iron-rich rock slides that looked as if they had happened only moments before. It sought shelter from the unmediated altiplano sun beneath white-blossomed cotton trees laden with vines and orchids. And in the fourth hour, we realized just how appreciative your right quad and your left big toe and your calf muscles can be when you reach the campsite and give them a rest.

Felicitas and Carlos and the mules had navigated the seven miles to the site, Chi­quis­ca, in half the time it took us. The upper site was already packed with the tents of a dozen people, mostly French couples, their bare calves painted with bug bites. Twenty-year-old Uriel connected a pipe to the spring, and we bathed in fresh glacial water using a pockmarked plastic Gatorade bottle for a showerhead. We drank tea and ate popped corn of the giant Peruvian variety in the last heat of the afternoon, as a pair of Andean condors circled three thousand feet above us.

The stars replaced the sun by seven o'clock—first Scorpio, with its two piercing eyes, and, after dinner, the sideways kite of the Southern Cross, rising above us on the south side of the valley. I fell asleep to the sound of the mules rolling in the cool of the dust above camp.

The next morning, we let gravity and alti­plano french toast drag us down the final hill of the canyon to Playa Rosalina, by the banks of the Apurímac. One mile lower than the main village of Cachora, we were in the heart of a tropical climate. Agave and saguaro cactus lined the path parallel to the river. May is the first month of the dry season, and the roar of the river, twenty feet below its high-water mark, was more pussycat than lion. Before the bridge, fruit trees signaled a spring. And within that grove, improbably, was a series of sturdy buildings that resembled an Andean Motel 6.

"The engineers came to build the lodge," Isabel Pancorvo told me. "The first time, I cooked for them, gave them beer and chichi [homemade Peruvian corn beer] and they paid. The second time, the same thing and they paid. The third time, they put in plumbing, ate my food, drank my chicha, locked the doors, and ran away. They didn't pay."

I found Isabel in a dark shack across from the deserted buildings at Playa Rosalina, waiting for the occasional hiker to walk by and buy a soft drink or chicha. In her broad-brimmed straw hat, she came about halfway up my chest. I bought three passion fruits and invited her to join us for a cup of mate de coca. She sat with us on a low wall outside the abandoned buildings. I asked where she lived. She pointed up the mountain.

"Behind the tree house?" I asked.

"I think in the tree house," Rebecca whispered to me.

"Alone?" I whispered back.

Rebecca quickly translated Isabel's rapid Spanish. She was sixty-two years old. There was a husband who was superfluous, and a few sons who had either died or run off to Lima—Rebecca was unsure. The deserted lodge was part of a Peruvian-French initiative, brokered in part by Eliane Karp, the French-born wife of former president Alejandro Toledo. The flight of the engineers presumably coincided with the end of Toledo's term.

"What did she say?" I asked.

"Something about debt forgiveness," Rebecca answered. "Is that a word?"

"Didn't she say something about Russia?"

"Sí, sí," Isabel answered. "Last year, four beautiful Russian ballerinas came with three musicians. They played and danced—right here." She pointed to the concrete terrace of the abandoned lodge as visions of sugarplum fairies danced in my head. Petrushka by the Apurímac, Swan Lake with condors, all to a balalaika accompaniment. "I taught them a huayño dance," she said, putting down her teacup and demonstrating the shuffle step. "I'll teach you."

"I bet Hiram Bingham never did that," I boasted to Rebecca fifteen minutes later as we crossed the bridge and waved good-bye to Isabel.

"You mean kick a small old Quechua woman?" It was true. I had had trouble with the shuffle step.

And then we began the uphill. The sun had started to shine, and although the switchbacks afforded the occasional shade, our conversation consisted of panting and pointing. A waterfall here, a hawk there.

"Chestnut-fronted parrots," Ana said as our arrival sent them into squawking flight. "And these," Ana said, stopping by a powder of yellow petals on the trail, "are lady's slippers, ayaq zapatillas. The locals put them in coffins to walk the dead to the afterlife."

Six hours after leaving the camp of Chi­quis­ca, we arrived at Marampata Hill. The twelve members of the Covarrubias family who owned that side of the valley had tapped into the glacial feed from above and carved out a small farm. Once again, we had a campsite to ourselves. From our private plateau, the Apurímac Valley opened up farther to the west and turned north, toward the jungle. We lunched on fresh cheese and guacamole from Covarrubias avocados and gazed hypnotized by fatigue and the view.

Carlos brought mate de coca and hot water for washing to our tent at six the next morning. It had rained during the night. But here, at ten thousand feet above sea level, we had a clear light for the big day at Choquequirao, the City of Gold. We left Felicitas, Carlos, and the mules to rest for the day. The path was level. And around the next bend, finally, Choquequirao.

We were still two hours away, but finally we had a sense of what we had hiked down and up a canyon to see. A puzzle, a mystery. Across the ravine and a thousand feet below us, a series of terraces, impossibly steep, had been excavated. Farther up the hill was another set of terraces, partially cleared but still with large clumps of trees. Far above the terraces, directly across from us, was the perfect helipad of the ushnu, "the sacred meeting place of Choquequirao," Ana said. And above that, joined by a neatly mown plaza on the ridge, was more of the site. At this distance, Choquequirao was a giant Sudoku with only a handful of numbers penciled in. In comparison, Machu Picchu is a fully filled color-by-numbers.

"People have known about Choquequi­rao for centuries," Ana told me. "There was a French explorer, the Count de Sartiges, in the 1800s. But before him there were Spaniards." And after. Some say the city was built during the reign of Pachacutec in the mid-1400s and became the last refuge of the Incas under the final ruler, Manco Inca, a hundred years later. Others say that pieces of pottery found at Choquequi­rao show that it was inhabited hundreds of years earlier. Each successive visit by anthropologists and archaeologists brings a new theory. And yet Choquequirao gave off a whiff of inscrutability as we came around the bend in the ravine.

"When I was a little girl," Isabel had told me down by the river, "I lived at Marampata and looked after the cows. But my uncles told me that Choquequirao was full of ghosts. 'Never go there,' they warned. Even when a cow wandered off into the ruins, we left her for the ghosts."

There was something ethereal about Cho­quequirao as we walked out of the trees and onto the paved terrace leading to the deserted city. City may be too grand a word for what has been uncovered so far. Choquequirao is compact in its emptiness. There are a couple of town squares and a handful of Incan stone buildings like the ones at Machu Picchu, with tapered doorways and intricate niches and hooks for hanging lamps or securing ropes for the roof thatching.

Ana pointed out a set of protruding beams at the level of the second floor. "Balconies," she said. "The Incas didn't know about balconies before the Spanish came. There are no balconies in the houses of Machu Picchu, only here." It's a small marvel, a modest discovery.

The latest find is one that hasn't yet made it into the books or blogs on Choquequirao. Four years ago, terraces were discovered on the far side of the mountain, the side away from our approach. On the walls of these terraces, in crude mosaics of white stone, are the figures of twenty-three llamas, some adult, some baby llamitas. Former first lady Eliane Karp has grandly taken some of the credit for this discovery. But as with everything else at Choquequirao, it's hard to know what to make of the llamas.
Puzzlement plus silence equals mystery. And silence is abundant at Choquequirao. During the eight hours we wandered through the ruins, lunched on the plaza, and explored the terraces and forests, we saw two groups of six people in addition to the guardian of the site, perched with a paperback on the heights of the sacred ushnu with an overview of anyone entering. That was all.

From the ushnu, I could look back at the path we had taken—two days to walk down one side of the canyon and up the other. I had become used to thinking of time as airplane time: one hour to get to the airport; check in two hours before departure; ten hours from New York to Lima. But here in front of me were two days, laid out in the zigzags of a rocky trail, the thread of a distant river, the tightness of a hamstring. There was a physicality to time that I never felt on a plane to Cuzco or a train to Machu Picchu.

In the tranquility of that late afternoon on the ushnu, I made the most precious discovery of time as I listened to Rebecca talk with wisdom about Mariluz and Rodrigo, Vilma and Ignacio, the children of Urubamba. She might not have become a pacu like Nazario. But the days spent walking the trails of the apu of Choquequirao had opened my ears to how my daughter had become an intermediary between two worlds.

At five o'clock, the sun set at the far end of the valley, and we began the two-hour hike back to Marampata. As the darkness fell, Rebecca and Ana strapped tiny miner's lamps to their foreheads. I followed their dim beams and voices as closely as I could, wondering how the Incas six hundred years ago, how Hiram Bingham a hundred years ago, how Nazario had felt out this trail, clinging to the protection of the mountain, moving forward without slipping into the Apurímac a mile below. I felt stupid not to have brought a lamp—as stupid, perhaps, as that bus driver the moment before he hit the rock that sent him and Nazario to their death.

Suddenly the path opened up in front of me, bright as dusk. I found Rebecca and Ana standing in wonder, their lamps extinguished. The earth had breathed a thousand fireflies to light our way home.

"I could keep walking like this another week," Rebecca said, taking my arm, "all the way to Machu Picchu." The apu of Choquequirao, or the spirits of Nazario and Hiram Bingham, had brought me gold.

PERU: PLACES & PRICES

The best way to explore the Choquequirao ruins is to fly into Cuzco and then drive to the town of Urubamba (9,400 feet above sea level), in the Sacred Valley. In Cuzco, a handful of tour operators can arrange trips to Choquequirao. Roger Valencia of Auqui Tours has a reputation for quality customized trips to all the famous sites in the Sacred Valley—Machu Picchu, Ausangate—and into the rain forest as well as to other parts of Peru. A five-day hike to Choquequirao includes tents, cots, three-course dinners with wine, and transportation to and from Cuzco or Urubamba (84-261517; auqui.com; five-day hike, $800 per person with a four-person minimum).

Travelers who don't mind carrying their own equipment can take a public bus from Cuzco to Saihuite, where they can hire a taxi or walk the 40 minutes to Cachora, the head of the trail. Farmers host the campsites (a donation is expected), and mules can be rented from concessionaires. Dario Cunza and his wife have a dozen horses and mules for hire at the Hospedaje San Pedro ($10 per day).

High-altitude hiking is best done with a hat, sunscreen, and insect spray. A sturdy rubber-tipped walking pole will save wear and tear on your knees.

The country code for Peru is 51. Prices quoted are for March 2009.

Lodging and Dining

The 30-room Hotel Sol y Luna, in Urubamba, is the luxury choice, with everything from massages to horseback rides to special pachamanca feasts (84-201-620; bungalows, $200). The Sonesta Posadas del Inca, in Yucay, has 84 rooms, a colonial chapel, and even a ghost (84-20-1107; doubles, $160). Part of the Libertador chain and with a private train to Machu Picchu, the Tambo del Inka Luxury Collection Hotel is scheduled to open later this year in Urubamba.

The road from Cuzco to Cachora passes through plenty of small towns, all of which have at least one shop where you can stock up on provisions, including (if you're lucky) the pita-shaped local bread. Campsites along the trail itself also have shops that may sell fruit, bottled beverages, and packets of instant noodles. Fresh water is abundant, but it pays to ask the locals where the stray horses are grazing—and to avoid those streams.

Reading

Hiram Bingham's Lost City of the Incas is a classic that, like the best non-fiction, is only partially true (Phoenix Press, $13). Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (Everyman's, $20) and the photographs of the mid-20th-century Cuzqueñan Martín Chambi ( martinchambi.com) are still my favorite introduction to the complex culture of highlands Peru.