Mark Johanson

Rambling along the bumpy road from Cuzco out to Cachora, it becomes abundantly clear that I’ve

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left the feverish Machu Picchu crowds behind and am now entering into the less polished corners of the Peruvian Andes. These are the fabled hills of the Inca, though they’re not the ones most visitors fly across oceans to see.There’s only one reason travelers go out of their way to visit the rural village of Cachora, and it’s to see a set of ruins that lie just out of sight on the far end of the Apurímac Valley: Choquequirao. Said to be up to three-times the size of the more widely-known Machu Picchu, these ruins astoundingly see only about a dozen visitors each day.I’ve always wondered what it must have been like to visit Angkor Wat, Chichén Itzá or Machu Picchu before the roads and tour buses arrived. Then I found out about Choquequirao, a citadel so far up in the Andes of Peru that archaeologists have only freed about 30% of it from the jungle.Before American explorer Hiram Bingham ever laid eyes on Machu Picchu, he was whacking his way through the Apurímac Valley, surveying the remarkable carcass of its so-called sister city. Scared off by the prospect of a grueling, four-day round-trip journey, however, few tourists have bothered to visit over the years. That could change now that the government has announced plans to build a cable car across the valley that would cart up to 3,000 visitors per day to the ruins in a trips lasting just 15 minutes.