turn right at machu picchu by mark adams

And then you are glad that you live 100 years after that first Hiram Bingham expedition and that you won't have to hike to Machu Picchu and get eaten alive by bugs and plants because you bought a train ticket. You learn the history of that original exploratory trek as you follow the author on his journey to recreate it. The story of his trek is broken up by the story of Hiram Bingham, the American adventurer/scholar who was the first to excavate Machu Picchu and other sites. And of course there's a great description of Machu Picchu. He sees all the Inca ruins that are off the beaten path. He gets blisters and bug bites and carries a pack around and learns how to machete. It tells the story of the author's midlife crisis trip to Peru and his crazy month long trek around the Andes with a too-adventurous Australian and a couple of mules. It was more entertaining than the guidebooks, but it still had some historical and contemporary information that I found useful. This was another Peru trip preparation book. Still, the book is nice enough to have finished it. Mr Adams works in the publishing business, yet, the book is too long, too many irrelevant elements in the story - not in the least Mr Adams’ life story itself and his penchant for metaphors which are often far-fetched, and not necessarily funny, however hard he is trying.

And part trying to understand how he could have been so wrong in his identification of the last stronghold of the Incas, claiming that it was Machu Pichu whilst missing the obvious clues further into the jungle. The book is part biography, part following Mr Bingham in his tracks. But the main one concerns the life and obsessions of Hiram Bingham, the first to rediscover Machu Picchu (or not, there may have been other claimants to that title, too). In “Turn Right at Machu Picchu” (2011) Mark Adams tells several stories, one is that of Mr Adams himself, and another that of the Incas, and their empire’s quick demise at the hand of the Spanish.

Turn right at machu picchu by mark adams