Turn Right at Machu Picchu

Turn Right at Machu Picchu

O N E
The Man from Oz
Cusco, Peru

As the man dressed head to toe in khaki turned the corner and began racewalking uphill in my direction, I had to wonder: had we met before? It certainly seemed unlikely. John Leivers was in his late fifties and spent most of his time exploring in remote parts of the Andes, machete in hand, searching for ancient ruins. The overdeveloped pop-culture lobe of my brain noted his passing resemblance to Crocodile Dundee—John wore a vest and a bush hat, and greeted me on the sidewalk outside my hotel with a cheery “Hallo, Mark!” that confirmed deep Australian roots—but there was something else strangely familiar about him.

“Sorry about the delay,” he said as we shook hands. “Just got back to Cusco last night.”

In a general sort of way, John Leivers reminded me of the professional explorers I’d encountered over the years while working as an editor at various adventure travel magazines in New York City—the kind of men and women who drove dogsleds to the South Pole and
combed the ocean floor for sunken treasure. John was extremely fit; dressed as if ready to clamber up the Matterhorn though it was a cloudless, seventy-degree day; and about as unattached as a man could be in the twenty-first century. He had no wife, no children, no permanent mailing address, just a cell phone and a Gmail account. He’d been recommended to me as one of the best guides in South America, and it had taken weeks to reach him. But now that he was finally here, sitting down to a late breakfast at my tiny hotel in Cusco, an old colonial city in the middle of the Peruvian Andes, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin. Because I didn’t exactly have a plan.

We ordered coffees, and John started to tell me about himself, occasionally stopping in the middle of a sentence—“When you’re traveling alone, you’ve got to be absolutely, um, seguro . . . sorry, it’s been a little while since I’ve spoken English”—then patting his ear like a swimmer dislodging water, as if a tenacious Spanish verb were stuck in there. John had started coming to Cusco twenty years ago, when he was
working as an extreme-trip leader, driving fearless globe-trotters across four continents in an open-back truck. “Back then the shops were still closed on Sundays and you could go months without seeing an American,” he said. During the last decade, a period during which the number of visitors to Cusco had multiplied exponentially because of its position as the gateway to Machu Picchu, John had seen interest in serious adventure dwindle.

Reprinted by arrangement with Knopf, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Turn Right ay Machu Picchu  by Mark Adams.
Copyright © 2011 by Penguin Group.