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Luck can play a major part in exploration. The combination of circumstances without which the explorer would have failed; the chance remark of a local followed up on a whim; serendipity at moments when all seemed lost; these are themes which recur in the writings of the successful. Of course, those who did not succeed will usually have a different tale to tell. Their luck is often that they escaped with their lives.

One of the luckiest breaks in the history of exploration must have been when Hiram Bingham stumbled on Machu Picchu, which was to become the most famous ruin in South America, a few days after leaving Cusco on his first attempt to find the lost Inca capital of Vilcabamba. However, people usually make their luck and Bingham is generally accepted as having been worthy of it. His subsequent travels through the supremely precipitous and hazardous region of the Urubamba valley showed him to have all the qualities of toughness and determination to have achieved success however long it took.

Following an earlier visit in 1909 to the recently cleared lost city of Choqquequirau he had returned to his alma mater, Yale, and inspired his friends and classmates to finance an expedition. For more than fifty years Choqquequirau had been thought to be the legendary last refuge of the Incas but this theory was now being questioned and the lure of a new lost city waiting to be found was irresistible.

The Yale Peruvian Expedition set out in 1911 and on the evening of the 23rd July their mule train made one of its first camps beside the road into the interior. It was a pleasant spot beside the river and, as it was raining the next morning, Bingham's companions, who included a naturalist and a geologist, decided to spend the day collecting specimens. He, however, had been grilling the farmer on whose land they were camping about ruins in the locality. Learning that there were some high up in the mountains opposite, he persuaded the man to show him the way. His only companion was the sergeant who had been sent from Cusco to accompany the party. They had to cross over the roaring rapids on four poles tied together with vines and then "we had a fearfully hard climb for an hour and twenty minutes. A good part of the distance I went on all fours. The path was in many places a primitive stairway, or crude stepladder, at first through a jungle, and later up a very steep, grass-covered slope. The heat was excessive, but the view was magnificent after we got above the jungle". At midday they reached some Indian huts and were given gourds of cool, delicious water and some sweet potatoes. The prospects did not look good and it was tempting to turn back, although the Indians said there were better ruins further along.

"One can never tell, in this country, whether such a report is worthy of credence… Accordingly we were not unduly excited. Nor was I in a great hurry to move. The water was cool, the wooden bench, covered with a woollen poncho, seemed most comfortable, and the view was marvellous...

"Leaving the huts, we climbed still further up the ridge. Around a slight promontory the character of the stone-face andenes began to improve, and suddenly we found ourselves in the midst of a jungle-covered maze of small and large walls, the ruins of buildings made of white granite, most carefully cut and beautifully fitted together without cement. Surprise followed surprise until there came the realization that we were in the midst of as wonderful ruins as any ever found in Peru".

Machu Picchu has been described as the most dramatic man-made structure ever created. Certainly it is the one place virtually every South American tourist wants to visit. Although Bingham, just like those who had put their faith in Choqquequirau, was eventually proved wrong in his belief that this was the last Inca stronghold, Machu Picchu remains the most celebrated and the most beautiful. The combination of the setting and the architecture is sublime and the best description I know is, appropriately, in John Hemming's classic, The Conquest of the Incas.

"The city that emerged was a place of magical beauty. It contains many buildings in the finest interlocking Inca masonry. But it is Machu Picchu's remarkable unity and state of preservation that are so satisfying to a visitor. Here, standing intact to the roof line, are the houses, temples and buildings of a complete Inca city. The house groups are set amid banks of tidy agricultural terraces, and Machu Picchu is bound together by a web of paths and hundreds of stairways. Its location is fantastic, with the city clinging to the upper slope and crest of a narrow ridge. The sheer sugarloaf of Huayna Picchu rises like a rhinoceros horn at the end of the spur, and the Urubamba roars in a tight hairpin bend around the site, trapped in a green canyon hundreds of feet below. Steep forested hills rise all around Machu Picchu, and its mystery is heightened by ghostly wisps of low cloud that cling to these humid mountains."

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