Hiram Bingham Hiking Trail to Machu Picchu

This guide to the Hiram Bingham Hiking Trail above Aguas Calientes opens with the farmer Melchor Arteaga demanding triple wages before leading a stranger up the mountain on the twenty-fourth of July, 1911. It follows that stranger, the Yale lecturer Hiram Bingham, who had actually come to Peru hunting for the lost Inca refuge of Vilcabamba, and the muleteer Agustin Lizarraga, who had signed his name on a wall here nine years earlier. Bingham and his Peruvian escort crossed the roaring Urubamba on a bridge of four lashed logs, on hands and knees.