from $5,530* per person	15 Days	July-September
Boutique accommodations		Exertion level: 4
Operator: Geographic Expeditions		18 people max

Entrancingly off the increasingly trod track, Choquequirao (“Cradle of Gold” in Quechua—“The Other Machu Picchu,” a recent article in the New York Times called it) is an amazingly preserved Inca outpost, four times the size of Machu Picchu, dramatically perched on a promontory nearly 6000 feet above the roaring Apurimac River Gorge. Though its existence has been known for some time, Choquequirao has only recently been accessible to nonacademics, and has quickly joined the ranks of the world’s great Lost Cities.

Our strenuous and splendidly rare mule-supported trek, created by our Peru monarch Clark Kotula, takes us over high passes, along perfectly preserved Inca trails lavished with magnificent Andean views, to the newly famous, but still little visited Choquequirao. These wondrous ruins, only 40 percent excavated, get a few hundred visitors in a year, as opposed to Machu Picchu’s 2,500 daily visitors, in large part because it takes some effort to get there—about 20 miles on foot across a 10,000-foot deep gorge from the nearest trailhead, to be precise.

After dallying in the ruins—“Twenty-five years ago Machu Picchu must have looked much like this,” the Times said—we cross the Vilcabamba Range from Choquequirao to Machu Picchu in five days, passing through remote indigenous villages and over a 15,900-foot pass between glaciated peaks to finally descend into the lush, orchid-profuse cloud forest that surrounds Machu Picchu, where we will wander extensively before heading to the Incan capital of Cusco (see Machu Picchu and the Urubamba), and on to Lima and home.