Turn Right at Machu Picchu revisited

I've placed Turn Right at Machu by Mark Adams on the Recommended Reading/Viewing list. My father recently finished reading it as well. Here's the masscommons take on Mark Adams's work:

In language that viewers of the 1984 hit movie, Romancing The Stone, will understand, middle-aged magazine editor Mark Adams wasn’t living the life of Jack T. Colton (the swashbuckling explorer played by Michael Douglas) or Joan Wilder (the successful romance-adventure novelist who never leaves New York City, played by Kathleen Turner).  He was living the life of Gloria (no last name given), Joan Wilder’s friend who never gets closer to an adventure than editing Wilder’s books.

Or as Adams bluntly puts it in his wry, self-deprecating, informative and engaging travelogue/history, Turn Right At Machu Picchu: Rediscovering The Lost City One Step At A Time, “After years of sitting at a computer in New York and sending writers off on assignment to Kilimanjaro and Katmandu…I wanted an adventure of my own.”


The adventure Adams chooses is retracing the steps of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer/adventurer who “discovered” Machu Picchu a century ago (and who served, after a fashion, as the inspiration for Indiana Jones).  As his tour guide, Adams selects experienced Australian native and Andean hiker John Lievers (who himself could be a model for Crocodile Dundee).

Adams skillfully weaves back and forth between Bingham’s three groundbreaking expeditions (1911-15) that, for better or worse, put Machu Picchu “on the map” for a cacophonous array of Northern Hemisphere seekers, and his own two trips with Leivers a century later.  Adams’ witty and rueful honesty about his own limitations, and his step-by-step revelations of his encounters with the wonders of the Andean landscape and people make Turn Right At Machu Picchu an enjoyable and useful introduction to the Incas, their legacy and their descendants.


Perhaps it’s as much a limitation of Adams’ audience as it is of himself and the genre in which he writes that we get only the barest outlines of the life and thoughts of Juvenal Cobos, the senior muleteer hired by Leivers for Adams’ two hikes.  Cobos and his family have guided thousands of adventurers from the US and other northern countries through their homeland during the century since Bingham first showed up in Peru.  When I finished reading Turn Right At Machu Picchu, the next story I wanted to read was his.