This story was selected as the WINNER of our “A Book Led Me There” competition. Following a sickness-stricken childhood, a traveler vows to discover the long-lost city of Machu Picchu, which she’d known only through books, battling mountain mudslides and broken boots while carrying her younger self on an adventure that once seemed impossible.
Sick children daydream.
When you’re quite ill, and quite small, transporting yourself anywhere else is powerful magic–even if only in your mind.
I was a sick child, and there’s pride in saying I grew out of it, but in the prevailing memory of my younger self, I am wrapped in blankets, curled up as if I could fold into a version of myself that felt better.
Books, of course, are any daydreamer’s greatest ally. And in those days, no book held my attention like Lost City: The Discovery of Machu Picchu by Ted Lewin.
Something about it enchanted me, this idea of a passionate professor finding not only a great city, but the great city–the long-lost capital of the Inca.
The opening lines of the book were about a little boy’s dream. Across time, it became my dream, too.
Often I sat and traced the art with one finger–slow and deliberate, mapping my path through the stone maze. One of my first true memories of grief was the realization I would never follow in Hiram Bingham’s footsteps.
I would never see Machu Picchu.
Life has a funny way of laughing at certainty.
Years passed, unexpected, beautiful, difficult. I learned to exist in a body that wasn’t at war. I summited Switzerland’s Jungfrau in heeled boots. I made a living as an editor. I fell in love several times.
I bought a house.
In packing, I found myself piling nostalgia into cardboard boxes. I couldn’t help but think about that child I’d once been. About her dreams. About Machu Picchu. And somehow, for the first time, it occurred to me.
I could bring her there.
Once the thought dawned on me, it stuck. I booked my flight before my mail rerouted.
I landed in Lima, Peru, and strangely, it was the scent of the place that swept me up first. Stepping out of Jorge Chávez Airport, there was something so distinct in the dust and the street carts and the heat, even at midnight, that intoxicated me. Lima was a far cry from the ancient grandeur of Machu Picchu, but it dazzled every sense.
A man stopped me on the street, pointing to the snake tattooed on my hand.
He asked me if I knew I wore the Uku Pacha, the serpent of the underworld, if I knew it was sacred. I said it was sacred to me, and he smiled like I’d given the right answer.
It dawned on me as I wandered in the dark that I’d purchased nothing in advance but my timestamped ticket to the Lost City. Machu Picchu was my mission; the rest was the scenic route.
So I found a hostel, and spent the next week stumbling through the capital in a sun-drunk haze. I watched beautiful people dance to Cuban beats at Cohiba Club. I befriended street dogs. I wandered the beaches of Miraflores and learned that the ocean speaks a different language when she rushes over little black stones instead of sand. All the while, I checked my phone in every Wi-Fi-friendly corner and hatched a proper plan.
I would take a direct-line bus to Cusco (a 24-hour ride!), take a second to Ollantaytambo (only 2 more hours), then hike to Aguas Calientes in the morning to catch a shuttle to Machu Picchu. It was as good as done.
Life has a funny way of laughing at certainty.
I did spend the first eighteen hours of my bus ride in relative comfort. Screens dangled from the ceiling showing an inexplicable marathon of gratuitously violent and uncensored Jean-Claude Van Damme films, and I seemed to be the only one who found this hysterical. But the seats were plush and snacks were served often. I rapidly learned that Peruvian cancha is the greatest destiny a corn kernel can fulfill, each little crunch a delight, borderline immune to diminishing returns. I developed a taste for Inca Kola, too–a sugary elixir made with lemon verbena but tasting, to an American tongue, pleasantly of bubblegum.
As the landscape morphed from city to desert, the sunset went unblocked in every direction. It reflected off the sands and turned the whole world pink. I glued myself to the window and marveled at a world suspended inside a rose-tinted jewel. I felt a smaller self peeking out from behind my eyes. Only when true darkness fell did we drift away and dream of ancient secrets.
When I woke, however, the bus had stopped. Everyone was speaking at once and I had only the foggiest idea what was being said.
I held up my phone with Google Translate: “I’m a dumb American. Please tell me what’s happening.” A young woman laughed, and carefully typed back an explanation–it was mudslide season. The river had eaten the road. We needed to evacuate.
As I climbed from the bus with my pack, the river immediately made her power known. The roar was deafening- and furthermore, the road was gone. An enormous mouth had opened and swallowed the pavement, leaving a gash of deep earth and rushing water across our path.
There was precious little safe ground to walk on. Several workers in yellow vests were screaming and herding everyone away from the widening gorge. Turning back meant miles of raw jungle, so with no other way forward, people began scrambling up the sheer mountainside. The earth shook beneath our feet, and under pressure, a mass of strangers congealed into little pockets. I found myself absorbed into a small group of other English speakers. We banded together in varying degrees of need: one of us in particular was very young for a solitary traveler, and as we made our way up the slippery mountain, she periodically froze in panic.
Gripped by familiar clarity, I took her bag, then removed my boots and lashed them to it. The mud had so thoroughly sunk into the tracks of my shoes that bare feet had better grip.
In times like this, I have come to respect fear as a form of meditation. You cannot worry over petty anxieties or insecurities when every cell in your body thrums with the focus of survival. The precipice to our left demanded the focus of survival.
In this way, soaked, muddied, sweating, and shaking, we managed one another over the crest and back down to a road. We linked arms and called strategic encouragements. We helped our most frightened companion down first, hand in hand, a cheer erupting when her feet reunited with pavement.
We tended to each other’s scrapes as family. I didn’t catch their names, but I remember them; they remember too.
We made our way to a town none of us recognized, and met a local driver who was willing to take us six more hours to Cusco for a day’s pay.
I paused just as I climbed into his truck, and, ravenous, purchased a small bag of tuna fruit from an old woman by the road. Her prices, no doubt, hiked steeply at my desperation. But I would have paid ten times more–in my heat and exhaustion, a perfect sweetness with just a hint of refreshing sourness, firm but chewy with seeds like tiny melon boba; I knew what the Incan Gods ate in Hanan Pacha, their world in the sky.
Hours passed in nauseating twists and turns, fog lines a mere suggestion and guardrails a myth, but when evening came, we were deposited safely where we’d asked to go. We went our separate ways in shared victory.
Cusco brought its own dizzying delights, and street artists smelling the tourism on my sunburnt neck. One charged me a tourist’s price to repair my battered boots–again, I paid gladly. I would need them in shape to climb 1,600 stone steps the next day.
I was sore and I was thrilled: Machu Picchu was so close I could taste it in the tang of hot grape brandy I had with dinner.
The next day, I rose before the sun and made my way to Aguas Calientes, in awe at every cobblestone. I paid the first guide who spoke with me, and as we boarded a shuttle, my eagerness amused him. He asked me why I wanted to see Machu Picchu so badly. I told him it was an old dream.
As our bus meandered to the top of the mountain, I could feel that younger self pulling on my shirt sleeve. The city was built in the mid-1400s, my guide was explaining, before the Spanish came, and I could hear her shouting I know! I know!
As we deboarded and entered, our heart raced in my chest.
All was hidden in mist at first, mysterious and shrouded as any great secret should be. But as my guide directed me, we climbed higher and higher, and so did the sun.
My first glimpse of the Lost City was from above. I could see every wall, standing guard as if the Inca had merely left to gather supplies.
I could see life here, the walls like veins and the structures’ divine genius on full display. There were stone monuments built to catch the sun during pinpoint-specific cosmological times, the mathematical precision as striking now as when it was first plotted. Grass grew lush on the terrace, and I felt generations of bodies pressing the pastures into beds.
I stood before the Temple of Three Windows and caught my breath, peering out at the same horizon they were built to capture six hundred years ago. My guide showed me the right angle at which to see the face of the mountains.
I leaned over the 1,900-foot drop of the Inca Bridge and laughed involuntarily.
It’s a rare thing in life, I find, for anything to look exactly as you imagined. But if I had held the pages of my beloved book up, it could have been a snapshot of this moment.
My guide went quiet, then. He seemed to sense my reverence, and gave it space to breathe.
He even let me lead for a little while, back down into the city. I stopped and stared at a llama that seemed to consider me in turn.
Then slowly, carefully, my feet followed the path my finger had mapped out all those years ago. I hardly noticed the strain of my muscles, the labor of my lungs in thin air, the blisters forming on my ankles.
Like tuna fruit, the view was so much sweeter for all the struggle it demanded.
For a moment, the voice of my thoughts grew young and light. I squeezed my own hand across time, reassuring my memory.
This is it, I thought. Kay Pacha–the world of the living.
We made it. We found it.
I drank the realization greedily, soaking up the details with the sun, letting it sink in that this was no longer an illustration, or a daydream, but at long last, impossibly, a sight to see with my very own eyes.
My eyes, and her eyes, too.
“Suddenly, the clouds burned off and the mountains were bathed in glorious light,” reads the prologue of Ted Lewin’s story.
“The dream foretold of something wonderful. He was sure.”
