Kim MacQuarrie

You can't go to Peru without stumbling upon Inca ruins. They are everywhere. Once you see them and not only see how well constructed they are but the often fantastic and seemingly improbable locations where they were built—you naturally want to know more about them.

 

 

I was always interested in biology, anthropology and books as a kid. I read a lot and dreamt of traveling the world and visiting exotic destinations and foreign cultures. I eventually received an undergraduate degree in biology and a Masters in anthropology.  I did part of my Master's degree in Peru, at La Universidad Catolica in Lima and did my fieldwork in the Amazon, living with a recently contacted tribe. I wrote articles for a variety of newspapers on the side in order to make ends meet and eventually that led me into a career mixing anthropology, biology, books, and documentary films.

 

 

Peru is a great place to keep those kinds of interests in balance. It's got it all—fantastic ruins, exotic cultures, great biodiversity and natural wonders, and an endless amount of stories to tell, whether through books or film.

 

 

In college I studied abroad in France for a year, and later did basically the same thing for my Master's in Peru. Studying abroad immediately converts you into an anthropologist, whether you want to be one or not, as you are forced to learn the language and end up hanging with the locals. It gives you a completely different perspective from that of living in your own country.  From that point on I was hooked—and I have been traveling whenever possible ever since. I actually just got back from a year off traveling around the world—and can't wait to do it again!

 

 

When I was in my early teens my grandfather gave me an old, wind-up, 8-mm movie camera that he bought in a pawn shop in Chicago. I started shooting films with that. Years later, while I was writing a book on Manu National Park in Peru, an American film company contacted me. They wanted to make a film on the park and ultimately hired me as their script writer. That was the beginning. I stayed on and eventually became a producer and director.

 

 

 In 1986. I had never been there before but arrived planning to stay a year while I worked on my Masters. That was at the height of the Shining Path guerrillas (who have since been eliminated). There was an army curfew at the time where you couldn't go outside of your house in Lima at night on pain of being shot. I remember riding from the airport in a special bus after the curfew and seeing tanks patrolling the deserted streets. This was a pretty wild period during which there was understandably very little tourism to Peru. Nevertheless, I was soon hooked on the country and instead of staying for one year, I stayed for four.

 

 

I've been going back on a fairly frequent basis for the last twenty years, making documentary films or working on books. The Peruvian government sent me on a tour last April to explore some of the recent archaeological discoveries among the ''northern kingdoms of Peru'' and what I saw was spectacular: giant pyramids looming from the desert, entombed Moche lords with golden jewelry, etc. Peru has this capacity to really ''hook'' you—I know a number of foreigners who, like myself, went down there and have always found one reason or other to keep going back. The country is not only endlessly fascinating but quite addictive. The people are great, the food is great, and there's a multiplicity of cultures that are all interwoven with one another.

 

 

You can't go to Peru without stumbling upon Inca ruins. They are everywhere. Once you see them and not only see how well constructed they are but the often fantastic and seemingly improbable locations where they were built—you naturally want to know more about them. The more I read about the Incas, the more interested I got. And eventually I wrote a book about them myself.

 

Your book, The Last Days of the Incas, is an extraordinarily detailed evocation of the end of the Inca Empire. How did you research it and how did you bring that time to life so vividly?

 

The first stage of research was simply living in Peru for four years and visiting many of the sites where the Incas had constructed their towns and villages and where many of the key battles during the conquest took place. I was especially intrigued to learn that the Incas had rebelled against the Spaniards after their conquest—and had fought an incredibly intense guerrilla war against the invaders for four long decades. They even moved their capital from the Andes down into the Amazon. When I lived with a recently contacted tribe at the base of the Andes in the Amazon, I found that they were still using Inca axe heads that had been traded 500 years before by their ancestors.

 

Later, I pitched an idea to my agent about a book detailing the Incas' ''final days.'' When the book was sold, I started to methodically read all of the first-person, 16^th-century chronicles that were available; these were mostly written by Spaniards but some were narrated by the Incas themselves. Using my experience in Peru and my background in writing and anthropology, I did the best that I could to bring the whole epic struggle and the main characters on both sides back to life. That was my goal—to allow readers to experience what it was like when 168 Spaniards set foot in Peru for the first time and set about conquering a ten-million-strong empire, the largest empire to ever have existed in the Americas. The Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire is, after all, one of the two greatest stories that have ever occurred in the Americas—the other being Cortes' conquest of the Aztecs.

 

 Yes, I'm working on a new book, tentatively titled ''Voyage Along the Spine of the Andes,'' which will be about a 4,500-mile voyage I'm going to make from Cartagena in Colombia all the way down to Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentina. During part of that trip I'm going to trek along portions of the 26,000 miles of roadway that the Incas built. So I'm currently reading a lot about how their vast road system worked and how the Incas used their roads as a kind of neural network along which they sent constant communications—verbally, by knotted cords called qhipus, and even by fire.

 

 

Clark Kotula, from Geographic Expeditions, contacted me with the idea of creating a tour that would follow the itinerary of the conquistadors in Peru, as portrayed in The Last Days of the Incas. Clark is, like myself, another American who was bitten years ago by the Peru bug and has spent years in the country. Clark suggested an itinerary that would basically follow in the footsteps of Francisco Pizarro and his men as they landed on the north coast of Peru in 1532 and then traveled up into the Andes, captured the Inca emperor, then headed south where they captured the Inca capital of Cuzco. The idea was that, once in Cuzco and visiting Machu Picchu, the trip would continue down into the jungle where the Incas built their last capital, Vilcabamba—a city from which they sent out guerrilla warriors and that took the Spaniards four more decades to conquer. The Incas' rebel capital then became lost to the world for the next 400 years, until it was rediscovered by an American explorer in the 1960s. That's actually how Machu Picchu was discovered in 1911—by an American historian who was searching for Vilcabamba.

 

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first tour that's been created that will actually follow in the footsteps of the original conquistadors who conquered the 2,500-mile-long Inca Empire. Not only will the tour allow participants to re-experience some of what the conquistadors and Incas experienced, but the route remains a spectacular one. We'll be traveling from the seacoast in the north up into the Andes where Pizarro captured the Inca Emperor, Atahualpa, then will head to Cuzco, the Incas' capital, on to Machu Picchu and then down into the Amazon jungle where the Incas' rebel capital of Vilcabamba can still be seen.

 

I personally believe that there are only a handful of countries that truly have the power to transform the modern traveler—countries that are so different, so spectacular, and that possess such unique cultures and histories that you really feel you have entered a different world. I would put India into that group,  also Nepal, Egypt, Botswana—and Peru. Visiting Peru is really like visiting another world. There are fabulous ruins and ancient cities on the coast, some going back 5,000 years in history—some of the oldest cities in the world (in fact, Peru is often now referred to as ''the Egypt of the Americas''). More spectacular ruins stud the Andes, the longest mountain chain in the world, and at least a handful of uncontacted Amerindian tribes still roam the jungles. Peru is thus one of a kind. I also think everyone owes it to themselves to visit the Inca ruins at least once in their lifetime.  That's one reason Machu Picchu was recently voted as a new ''wonder of the world.'' It is. In fact, so many of the Incan ruins are. I myself feel very fortunate to have stumbled across the country so many years ago. That experience has had a huge influence on my life.