Turn Right At Machu Picchu
by Mark Adams
(Text Publishing $30)
This is very good, with an unusual proviso; this narrative has more routine everyday mountain climbing than anything I've read. Mountains are climbed before breakfast, with another before lunch and another before dinner. There is more perpendicularity here than I have experienced before and was almost as vertiginous and tiring as if I was walking the walk and not just reading the read.
Mark Adams had never done any serious climbing or exploring before he undertook this catalogue of exhaustions. He edited an adventure travel magazine and got interested in the American academic, adventurer and explorer - and chancer - Hiram Bingham III, who achieved great celebrity by "discovering", in 1911, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes, which are now visited by tens of thousands of tourists every year. That is to say, "interested" enough to check up on Bingham's veracity, and to undertake the same epic walk.
He had the great good luck and judgment to engage as guide an Australian, John Leivers, whose obsessive preoccupation with Peruvian archaeology and history must have made this admirable book achievable.
Because it is very well written, whether the immediate subject is the scenery; the topography; the social history; the religious symbolism and mystery; and the dazzling engineering accomplishment of the Inca architecture or what it is like to walk hundreds of miles around a strange part of the world, we have a vigorous traditional literary travel book.
