Turn Right at Machu Picchu — Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

Mark Adams was, by his own description, the last person who should have been hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. As executive editor at a travel magazine, he had spent fifteen years commissioning other people’s adventures from behind a desk in New York — and when he finally decided to retrace Hiram Bingham’s 1911 journey through the Peruvian Andes, he hired an experienced Australian explorer named John Leivers to guide him, and packed boots he had never broken in.

Two Journeys, One Book

Turn Right at Machu Picchu (2011) works as both adventure travelogue and serious historical investigation, and both strands are engaging. Adams’s own journey — through Cusco, along remote Andean trails, over high passes at altitudes that kept doing unpleasant things to his body — is narrated with genuine comic self-deprecation. Leivers, the experienced guide, treats Adams with the measured patience a professional reserves for a client who is trying their best.

The Bingham Question

The historical strand is more substantial. Hiram Bingham III was a Yale lecturer in Latin American history who reached Machu Picchu in July 1911 with a Peruvian guide named Melchor Arteaga — who knew exactly where he was leading the expedition, because he had farmed there. The citadel had never been “lost” to the Peruvian locals; it had been unknown to the Western world, which is a different thing. Adams traces this distinction carefully, and also investigates the controversy surrounding the thousands of Inca artefacts Bingham removed to Yale — artefacts that Peru spent decades trying to repatriate, and that were finally returned in 2011, the centenary of Bingham’s arrival.

A handsome, charismatic Yale adventurer who became a US senator, Bingham is also frequently cited as one of the real-life inspirations for Indiana Jones — and Adams is sharp on how Bingham’s own romantic, self-mythologising National Geographic dispatches turned a collaborative expedition (he relied on local farmers, guides, and prior visitors) into the legend of a lone heroic discoverer. The book becomes, in part, a meditation on how history is written by whoever tells the most compelling story.

What Was Machu Picchu?

The “one nagging question” driving Adams forward is deceptively simple: what was this place actually for? Travelling with the archaeologist-minded Leivers and consulting modern scholars, Adams walks the reader through the competing theories — that the citadel was a royal estate built for the Inca emperor Pachacuti, a religious and ceremonial centre aligned to the sun and the surrounding sacred peaks, or some combination of both — and conveys just how much remains genuinely uncertain. Along the way he visits other, lesser-known Inca sites that almost no tourists reach, restoring Machu Picchu to its proper context as one node in a vast and sophisticated Andean network rather than an isolated wonder.

Andean Time and a Desk Man’s Transformation

Beneath the history, the book is quietly about transformation. The travel editor who had spent fifteen years living adventures vicariously slowly becomes, through blisters and altitude sickness and genuine wonder, something closer to an actual explorer — and falls in love with Peru and its people in the process. Adams is wry on the culture clash between his deadline-driven North American expediency and an Andean relationship to time that refuses to be ruled by the clock. It is this personal thread, more than the history, that gives the book its warmth.

Discovery and Its Discontents

Running beneath both journeys is the book’s most thoughtful theme: the ethics of “discovery” itself. Adams handles the now-familiar reckoning with care, neither lionising Bingham as a swashbuckling pioneer nor flatly condemning him as a thief, but holding both truths at once — that he genuinely brought Machu Picchu to global scientific attention, and that his expeditions removed thousands of artefacts to Yale in ways that look, a century later, like a textbook case of colonial extraction. That those artefacts were finally repatriated to Peru in 2011, the very centenary of Bingham’s arrival and the year of the book’s publication, gives the story a satisfying sense of closure. Adams’s restraint here is a feature, not a flaw: he lays out the competing claims and lets the reader weigh the uncomfortable truth that the history we inherit is usually the version told by whoever held the camera and the printing press.

Verdict

Turn Right at Machu Picchu is among the best popular introductions to Machu Picchu and the Inca world available — serious about the history, honest about the colonial complications, and genuinely funny about the author’s own shortcomings. The running jokes about physical misery can wear slightly in the middle, and readers wanting pure trekking narrative may find the historical detours slow, but the balance is expertly judged. The Peru of the book — its landscape, its altitude, its villages, its specific quality of light and isolation — is one of the best available accounts of what the Inca heartland actually looks and feels like to walk through. For anyone planning a trip to Peru, or simply curious about the most famous ruin in the Americas, it is close to essential.

It is the kind of travel book that sends you to the airport — or at least to the deeper history of a place you thought you already understood.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A smart, funny, and genuinely illuminating blend of travelogue and history — the ideal companion for anyone drawn to Machu Picchu.

Reading Guides

• Mark Adams Books in Order
• Where to Start with Mark Adams
• Books About Peru: Essential Reading for Visitors to the Andes
• Best Travel Books of All Time