Author Description

When Christopher Portway and his companion David Taylor decided to follow the royal path of the Incas from Bolivia through Peru to Ecuador and Colombia, they held no illusions as to the difficulty of the task they has set themselves. Indeed, their first task was to find the road itself. Built by the Incas in the fifteenth century, the purpose of the royal road was to connect their southern capital of Cuzco with their northern city of Quito. Subsequent extensions to this original road took it north into Colombia and south into Argentina. Overall, it covered some 3,250 miles. But this road is no signposted and neatly paved way. The road when it was built varied between 15 and 24 feet wide and from being a series of rough steps cut into a rocky mountainside, to a built up causeway over waterlogged ground, to a simple waymarked track across wide empty grassland. Along its length rest-houses, temples and forts were built. But the road today is no longer continuous and whereas in places its agger is clearly defined, in others it simply disappears - though many of the building remain. Becoming lost in so vast a territory was a real possibility, since no only were maps of the supposed route rare, but those the two of them possessed contradicted each other to an alarming degree.