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Juliet Clough hikes to Vilcabamba, the
Inca stronghold that held out longest against the conquistadors
DAWN on Espíritu Pampa, the Plain of Ghosts. I wake to gaudy sounds:
parrots squabbling, the shrieks of a pig having its throat cut -
I hope it's not the friendly animal that earlier tried to join me
in my tent.
Since she was accompanied by a permanent halo of flies, I resisted
her blandishments without difficulty.
Remnants of empires: Huinay Huayna and the Urubamba
River in Peru
High in the league of lost cities, Vilcabamba
has seized explorers' imaginations in much the same way as Atlantis
or El Dorado. The legendary stronghold from which Manco Inca and
his successors ruled in exile for 40 years after the Spanish conquest
of Peru vanished off the map after 1572 when the conquistadors arrived
finally to rout its defenders.
Seven of us, including the explorer John Hemming and a Peruvian
archaeologist, Adriana von Hagen, have decided to follow the last
of the Incas as they retreated deep into the jungled ravines of
Vilcabamba. From the moment of accepting this irresistible invitation,
I decide to keep quiet about my lack of hiking cred. Can I really
be the only person here who has never before washed her knickers
in a waterfall, swung on a vine or dug insect eggs out of her person
with a Swiss army knife (thanks, pig)?
A few American explorers mad their way to Espíritu Pampa earlier
in the 20th century, but the positive identification of its jungle-suffocated
ruins as those of the missing Vilcabamba proved elusive.
Enter John Hemming. Researching his book, The Conquest of the Incas,
first published in 1970, Hemming had unearthed a Spanish priest's
contemporary account of a Vilcabamba palace "covered in roof
tiles". This post-colonial detail, unknown in other Inca sites,
provided irrefutable evidence. Espiritu Pampa and Vilcabamba had
to be one and the same. It was, Hemming, tells me "the most
thrilling moment of my research".
We follow Manco's route, 10 bus hours beyond Ollantaytambo, on an
unmade mountain road hairpinning high into the Cordillera Urubamba.
Above us, glaciers lick at jagged cones of rock. Far below, I catch
a glimpse of a floating hawk and a thatched farm where a woman in
scarlet clothes and saucer hat shears a struggling sheep.
The ruins of Vitcos, Manco's first capital in exile and the place
of his murder, sprawl across a hilltop in extravagantly beautiful
countryside above Huancacalle, where the six-day trek begins. Sheaves
of arum lilies choke watercourses winding below sweeps of Inca terracing
and past the enigmatic shrine of Chuquipalta. With its precisely
cut steps and bosses, their angles shading off into natural curves,
the white rock in its silent valley reflects a powerful residual
sanctity.
We picnic among the flowers that colonise every yard of Vitcos's
tumbled stones, shaded by scarlet-tasselled Oreocallis grandiflora
and lupins tall as trees. Around us, a stupendous amphitheatre of
peaks rises, fold upon greeny grey fold, to end in the icy glint
of Pumasillo, the Puma's Claw, just visible at 20,000ft.
For all its gung-ho appeal, ours is a luxury expedition. It offers
hardy romantics a low-altitude, high-stamina alternative to the
Inca Trail. Ten pack animals and six mule drivers carry comfortable
tents, a chemical loo and an entire camp kitchen complete with staff
of three. Come mealtimes, picnic tables bloom in the wilderness,
loaded with pumpkin soup and tortillas, potato pancakes and delicate
fritters made of quinoa, the high-protein Andean grain.
When human legs fail during eight- or nine-hour stretches, we each
have a pack pony. Mine has a worn, leather bridle, bound with silver
and bits of nylon twine. He stands in exactly the same relationship
to me as he would to a sack of maize. I find his follow-me leadership
least admirable at the moment when, eyes shut against the vegetation
thrashing in my face, I am garotted by a hanging noose of vine and
yanked backwards out of my saddle.
Stretches of paved Inca road, some as steep as stairways, surface
and peter out along a route haunted by the ghosts of an empire in
retreat. The going is harder today than it was in the 16th century.
Generations of mules and cows have taken their toll on paving never
meant for animals bigger than llamas. Landslides have swept whole
sections of the path into forested ravines hundreds of feet below.
Mostly I prefer to walk. Given that two of my Peruvian companions
have seen pack animals lost over such precipices, I would rather
do my own falling.
Mountain rivers on their way to the steaming valley floor gouge
the route into a seemingly endless succession of highs and lows.
I grow to dread the lows, knowing that at the bottom lies not only
the start of another heartbreaking ascent but a torrent bridged
by two or three unstable saplings, over which I shall have to crawl,
ignominiously, on hands and knees. Here I salute the staunchness
of my boots, which, at the end of the day, have kept my feet the
only dry pair out of seven and the envy of all.
Few other Peruvian treks descend to the ceja de selva, the eyebrow
of the jungle, and this for me is the true magic of Vilcabamba.
If each day feels like an Oscar-winning achievement, it is one crowned
with eight-foot sprays of orchids, with scarlet bromeliads and tree
ferns, with whole banks of wild begonia. A puma's cough, the call
of oropendolas and cock-of-the-rock, whisking technicoloured tail
feathers high across the canopy, make for the special effects. And
you get to dine with megastars: the Southern Cross and the celestial
llama whose shadowy body spreads far across the Milky Way.
At the end of the road, we cross the Inca bridge that links the
outside world with the city of lost causes. What the Spaniards began
the jungle has all but completed. Vilcabamba is almost invisible,
blotted out by rampant vegetation: its stonework prised apart by
giant forest trees and groping vines; its outlines smothered by
moss and ferns and 10ft stinging plants. Without the meticulous
site drawings of the explorer Vincent Lee we would have been lost.
Clearing a path to the Palace of the Fine Ashlars takes three men
with machetes the best part of an hour. If you see a snake wriggling
away, it's not dangerous, say the campesinos. The deadly ones are
less easily scared. And there are the roof tiles, a few fragments
of terracotta caught by a strangler fig in mid-stride across a toppled
wall.
A further eight hours' ride through soaking coffee groves, plus
a two-day drive, lies between us, Cuzco and the hallucinatory vision
of the Hotel Monasterio, as un-Inca a mirage as you could possibly
hanker after. I have been fantasising, guiltily, for days about
little bottles of shampoo, 24-hour room service, painted acres of
Spanish saints and archangels, piped plainsong, piped water.
But there's to be many a slip. We have to abandon one bus while
fording a swollen river and to jump from another as it veers too
near the edge of a sickening precipice and begins to list towards
the drop.
The 34-hour journey involves a lift in a truck full of coffee beans
and hungover Andeans, the latter much in need of the former, having
overdone Mother's Day revelries the night before. We shiver through
two bus nights in wet clothes, nights enlivened by a drunk on the
roof, two punctures and a broken axle, a search by armed police
and a video showing Amazon Indians shaving calluses off their heels
with machetes for bait to catch piranhas. Crossing the 16,000ft
Malaga Pass in the small hours, I wrap damp long-johns round my
neck in a vain search for warmth and reflect on many "firsts"
of the trek.
The extreme isolation of Vilcabamba
and its modesty in architectural terms may well ensure that the
ruins are never fully excavated. Its romance lies in its story,
its jungle secrecy, its poignant, unassailable position at the end
of a road going nowhere.
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