The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (26 page)

Don’t get me wrong, the route itself sounds fantastic. It’s a four-day trek that passes through or near a number of dramatic ruins, crosses Andean passes at almost 14,000 feet, and looks down into the wild and roadless Sacred Valley. But concerns about litter, overcrowding, and erosion forced the Peruvian government to place tight restrictions on the Inca Trail in 2000. No more than five hundred hikers a day can head out from the trailhead (although this still sounds like a lot), and they’re obliged to travel with a government-approved guided tour group at a cost of around $500 a head. While I’m certain that the hiking is stellar, it’s the expense and the forced group dynamic that puts me off. Plus, the only Peruvians you’re likely to meet along the way are the guides and the porters hired cheaply to carry your supplies, which, frankly, makes me a little uncomfortable.

Inca Trail hiking groups start at kilometer marker 82 along the Cusco-to-Machu-Picchu railway, the same spot where the adjacent road ends and where a
colectivo
bus dropped me off at six one morning to begin my own hike through the Sacred Valley. At the end of the road is a checkpoint where the Inca Trail tour groups have to show their government-issued permit before climbing into the mountains. The checkpoint also exists to keep freeloading gringos like me from walking along the railroad tracks. But the girls and staff at the Sacred Valley Project had told me how to avoid detection and even provided me with a hand-drawn map. So I hopped out of the
colectivo
and made my way up an inconspicuous livestock path skirting the hillside. It was just after dawn, the sky still gray, and I was startled by roosters as I snuck past a couple of small farmsteads. After
less than a mile, the dirt footpath dropped through some scrubby brush to meet the railroad tracks and the surging Rio Urubamba. And then there I was, on my own private Inca Trail, one that’s still in use by the Incas’ modern-day descendants.

The Urubamba was the color of chocolate milk and espresso foam, surging with a ferocity that maybe should have made me nervous. It was the tail end of the rainy season, and the river levels were as high as they normally get. In 2010, the river flooded after a particularly wet year, and water washed out the bridges and the banks, taking the railroad with it. Tourists at the base of Machu Picchu were stranded for days and had to be airlifted out by helicopter. I’d been assured by the girls in Ollantaytambo that the water levels were safe, but as I started following a faint footpath next to the tracks, the white noise of the rapids was loud enough to drown out the birdsong.

Within the first couple of miles, I was already pretty pleased with my decision making. The route was unquestionably beautiful. The Sacred Valley is a deep
V
that narrows periodically into a steep canyon, with walls as green and lush as Huaycán’s had been brown and dry. Small waterfalls bounced their way down the mountainsides, and wavy stalks with yellow blossoms sprang up in clustered bouquets on either side of the tracks. Rarely did I have to walk on the railroad ties themselves, since a faint trail usually followed alongside, sometimes diverging from the track altogether to look down on the river from a rocky ledge.

I was five or six miles along the first time I heard a train whistle. It spooked me a little, and I scrambled into the brush to let it pass. Five or six deep blue cars clacked by, slowly enough for me to make eye contact and nod to the curious tourists inside. I just grinned at them a little nervously
that first time, feeling guilty and exposed. I had never heard of a train pulling over to scold someone, but then I had never walked illegally on a railroad track in Peru before. Eventually, that first little train rounded a corner, and all I could hear was its increasingly distant whistle.

This scene played out twelve or fifteen times throughout the day. The ticket agent in Ollantaytambo had explained to me that a few different classes of trains all ran on this line. There was a dirt-cheap locals’ train, on which
turistas
are forbidden, plus a couple of varieties of tourist train, on which the locals are priced out. The first-class train has cocktails and perfumed towels, while a slightly cheaper option caters to family travelers and backpackers. The cars on the locals’ train, I imagined, were something like steerage. The tourist trains, meanwhile, were actually rather beautiful as they came and went, deep blue or bright red against a landscape where the only other primary colors were the sporadic yellow wildflowers.

After a couple of miles, I came to a small set of stone ruins. A sign leaning nearby identified the site as Qanabamba, and I wandered around the ancient walls and weathered granite foundations for a while, feeling lucky to be there. Passengers on the train could only glimpse the site while chugging past, while hikers on the Inca Trail would be looking down on it from a distant ridge on the other side of the river. I ran my hands along the smoothed walls of the roofless houses, feeling like the last man on Earth.

When I walked back to the tracks, though, I was startled to find two young girls with backpacks, strolling in the opposite direction.

“Buenos dias,”
I said.
“Como van?”

They were dressed in skirts and simple cardigans and reminded me instantly of the girls at the Sacred Valley Project.
They greeted me without smiling, and the older of the two, maybe twelve, put her hands on her hips.

“So what do you think of the ruins, then?” she asked in Spanish, a bit brassy. “They’re pretty, no?”

I smiled. They were very pretty, I said. Then she set about quizzing me, each time taking a stab at answering her own question.

“Where are you going? Machu Picchu?”

“Where are you from? Argentina?”

“Who are you with? Alone?”

I answered her in my bad Spanish, asking where they were from and how pretty the scenery was farther down the trail. They lived nearby, the older girl said, and she told me the village where they were going, but the name meant nothing to me. The younger girl, all of eight, smiled bashfully for a few minutes before piping up in a tiny voice.

“Sir,” she asked, “do you have any cookies?”

Her companion tried to shush her, but I laughed and said that I did. In fact, I told her, I was hungry too. So I took out a few granola bars and split them up among the three of us. They thanked me, and for another minute we just stood there, chewing silently, staring at the mad river and the stone remnants of their culture that they walk past every day.

Eventually I came to the first of several short tunnels and quickly jogged through, pausing first to listen for approaching whistles. Inside, it was cool and dark, with enough room that if a train did come, I could probably have pressed myself hard against the stone walls to avoid being hit—but I didn’t want to test that theory. Between tunnels, I passed Quechua grandmothers toddling toward me on the tracks, toting their mystery bundles and smiling their gap-toothed
buenos dias
. Occasionally, I walked by a rocky pasture filled with pensive-looking sheep.

Around noon, I rounded a bend to find a five-man rail crew loitering fifty yards ahead, conspicuous in their bright blue jumpsuits.

Busted, I thought. I had walked around the corner obliviously, and there was no chance they hadn’t seen me. There was nothing to do but walk right up to them. I tried to look nonchalant, prepping my oblivious gringo shrug for when they asked me what I was doing walking along the tracks. The crew was leaning with their pickaxes against a gas-powered cart just off the line, a kind of flatbed trolley with a railing, like something you’d see in a mine. As I approached, they all looked up at me. I held my breath, smiled, and nodded at the closest one.

“Hola, amigo!”
he chirped brightly, waving an oily hand. Then he looked back down at the sandwich in his other hand. A couple of the others gave me halfhearted waves, and the remainder ignored me altogether. I walked right past without so much as a questioning glance.

Well, I thought, so much for the strict security measures at PeruRail.

In the early afternoon, at a spot where the tracks veered briefly away from the river, I came to a small depot, which wasn’t something I’d expected to find. It was a squat cinder-block building with another uniformed PeruRail employee dozing on a bench outside. Beneath him, a couple of puppies were playing in the dirt. I’d have assumed that the shack was just some kind of utility building or switching station, but even as I walked up on it, I heard the teakettle fermata of the train whistle behind me. Just as I reached the station, a single red car rolled up, so slowly that for a moment I thought that it must be railroad bulls, finally coming to pinch me after hearing from the crew up the line. But the car hissed to a stop in front of the depot, and
two bundled
abuelitas
stepped out gingerly, holding up the hems of their skirts.

This must be the locals’ train, I realized, and as I walked past the stopped car, I snuck a quick glimpse inside, where a handful of other Quechua passengers sat on plain wooden benches, surrounded by sleepy-looking children and parcels of wrapped blankets. How appropriate, I thought, that the Machu Picchu rail system should be as hopelessly stratified as everything else in Peru.

Then, as the lonely car chugged back into motion, I suddenly wondered whether this simple recognition of profound income inequality might not account for a lot of Thompson’s transformation in South America. After all, here was a Louisville kid from relative comfort, confronted with a form of class separation so intense as to seem totally alien. Sure, Thompson had been in slums in the United States and the barrios of the Caribbean, but even the tin-roofed villages of Puerto Rico, he wrote, were “like Harlem” compared to South America’s Indian lands. In Peru, he discovered a social hierarchy so entrenched, so inscribed into the DNA of its people, that almost no one even bothered to question its legitimacy.

Back home, the best and brightest minds in the country were locked into this modernization theory—a sociological school that considered income inequality something a place like Peru could simply transcend with economic growth. Our whole foreign policy at the time was built around this idea, that any gulf between the haves and have-nots was just a stage countries go through on their way to something better, something more egalitarian. But from his vantage point on the ground, Thompson was beginning to have his doubts.

“If the Alliance for Progress requires democracy in Peru
to become a fact instead of just a pleasant word,” he wrote, “then the Alliance is in for rough sledding.”

Maybe, I thought, Thompson was beginning to see the triumph of the oligarchy as something other than a blip on the path to modernity. Maybe it was more than just a bleak but temporary phase for developing nations to overcome. What if it was something that could take hold anywhere, regardless of a country’s level of development? What would that mean for the places he’d visited in the Andes?

What might it mean for the United States?

The last tunnel before reaching Machu Picchu was the longest by far. It was actually two stone tunnels back to back, as my hand-drawn map warned me, with a distance of just a few yards in between. As with the others, a sign outside warned me that pedestrians were forbidden from passing through, and had the water level not been so high, it might even have been possible to avoid the tunnels altogether by walking along the riverbank. As things were, however, I strapped on my headlamp and crouched next to the track, listening for the sound of oncoming trains. I had noticed that I could feel a little vibration in the steel whenever one was approaching, but when I laid my palm on the rail, I felt nothing. So I headed in.

Jogging on loose gravel is possible, but running is difficult, and the ground inside was of the soft-pack, pebbly variety that mountaineers call scree. Some of the previous tunnels had clearly been blasted, with jagged sides of exposed rock, but these were symmetrical arches with smooth granite walls. I hadn’t changed my headlamp batteries since Colombia, so the bulb threw off a dim yellow beam that I followed through the darkness as I tried not to stumble over an errant brick or a railroad tie.

I was about to emerge from the first of the two tunnels when I heard it—a shrill, reverberating note that sent a chill through me. For a moment, I froze, trying to hear which direction the train was coming from, but the valley’s confusing acoustics had made that impossible all day long. The distance in front of me was roughly the same as the distance behind, so I didn’t stop to weigh my options. I grabbed the straps of my backpack, pulled it tight to my body, and ran. If I’d have been thinking, I might have just stayed between the two tunnels, where I probably could have pressed against the cliffside foliage tight enough to let the train pass by comfortably. But I wasn’t thinking, and I charged impulsively into the darkness of the second tunnel, the weak beam from my headlamp swinging wildly in front of me.

The whistle blared again. It sounded closer this time and had a note of urgency to it, more like the tenor blast of a bus bearing down on you than the screech of an old-school steam engine. More like an air horn, really. My feet struggled for traction on the gravel; I felt like I was running through a pile of tiny marbles. For the first time all day, I was conscious of the sound of my breathing and the weight of my pack. It jostled behind me as I pumped my legs, and I felt the sweat soaking through the collar of my T-shirt.

Shit, shit,
shit
, I thought.

The horn sounded once more, earsplitting this time and definitely echoing through the tunnel itself. Just ahead of me, the brightly lit opening was the shape of a bread loaf, and I squinted and exhaled hard as I burst outside.

I steered immediately into the brush, putting a good six feet between me and the tracks. Then, still panting, I turned to see the mouth of the tunnel.

Nothing happened. No train, no noise.
What the fuck?
A few seconds ticked by. I held my breath and heard almost
nothing, not the rumble of an engine or the scrape of metal wheels, just a middle-range whine, like the drone of a revving go-kart.