When Machu Picchu is overrun with tour buses, Choquequirao—just twenty-five miles away and accessible only on foot—is deserted. Jonathan Levi sets off on a five-day trek and discovers the secret of Peru's original El Dorado

Don Nazario Turpo died a stupid death. The driver of the bus in which he was traveling from Saylla to Cuzco didn't realize that the local campesinos were making one of their quixotic low-tech protests—placing stones and tree trunks across the road without warning. Fourteen others besides Nazario died in the crash, and fifty were wounded. I had met Nazario, the pacu, or shaman, of Ausangate, a couple of years before at Machu Picchu. Long after the other tourists had gone, he sat in the quiet of the ruins and told my daughter's fortune. Although pacu translates into English as shaman, the pacu is little different from the priest of any religion who acts as an intermediary between the human and the divine. It's just that in the religion of the Incas—and Nazario, like most Peruvians, was a descendant of the Incas—mountains, rivers, and all the forces of nature are apus, spirits. "I'm coming back to Peru," Rebecca had whispered to me as we walked past grazing llamas in the dusk.

"But not to Machu Picchu," Nazario had said to me the next morning. The impregnable fortress of the Incas had fallen to the forces of mass tourism. Every day, foreigners by the hundreds were arriving from Aguas Calientes on buses belching diesel, and charging down the Inca Trail and through the Sun Gate. They came here guzzling pisco sours on the five-hundred-dollar-a-head Orient-Express Hiram Bingham deluxe day-trip from Cuzco, gazing seraphically at campesinos tilling their fields with hand ploughs—a journey to what is fast becoming one of the world's most endangered gorgeous sites.

Nazario had mentioned another ancient Incan citadel, a name full of guttural q's in the local Quechua language. No one went to this place. But it wasn't until Roger Valencia of the tour operator Auqui e-mailed me with news of Nazario's death that I wrote back to ask if he knew about this sister to Machu Picchu.

"Choquequirao," Roger answered instantly. "Even more beautiful than Machu Picchu. When do you want to go?"

Choquequirao. Choqeqirau. Chokekiraw. I Googled as many variations as I could imagine and came up with very little. I pulled my much abused copy of Lost City of the Incas off the shelf and searched the index. Lost City was written by Hiram Bingham forty years after he had become the first Northerner, in 1911, to "discover" Machu Picchu. Pictures of Bingham in Peru show a certain kind of Yalie who was still in residence several generations later: a Faulknerian dreamer from the provinces (in Bingham's case, Hawaii instead of Mississippi); a man whose height and good looks made him the rumored inspiration for Indiana Jones, and doomed him to a desire for easy conquests. Yet without the inheritance that many of his classmates brandished on their lapels, Bingham realized that he needed to write himself into mythology. "Machu Picchu was to Bingham the crowning of all his purest dreams as an adult child," wrote Che Guevara decades later.