Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge, by John Gimlette (Alfred A. Knopf 363 pp.)

Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time, by Mark Adams (Dutton/Penguin Group 319 pp.)

Review by Robert Knight

Oh, to be outdoorsy and in South America, which two English-language writers describe in recent books. One went north of the equator, the other went south. Both got to know nature really well, though nature wasn’t often gentle with them.

One of them, British travel writer John Gimlette, explores the three countries known collectively as the Guianas: Guyana, the former British Guiana; Suriname, the former Dutch Guiana; and the one that remains a European colony, French Guiana.

In Wild Coast, Gimlette writes that “Guiana” is an Amerindian name for the soggy Caribbean coast of South America (not to be confused with the Guineas of Africa and Southeast Asia or a British pound note). It was the 17^th-century Dutch who called it de Wilde Kust. For half a century, they were the primary European residents of Guiana, until they traded it away to England in return for an obscure island where little grew, Manhattan.

Gimlette’s book focuses mostly in the first half on Guyana, the rest on Suriname (a.k.a. Surinam). These two countries have failed democracies, failed economies and dozens of ethnic groups that coalesce, sort of, into four large ones: the Europeans; the coast-hugging Creoles; the Maroons, descendants of slaves who fled into the wild and often-grisly rain forests of the Guianas’ interior; and the Amerindians.

Not a few of the residents come from China, India and Indonesia. Combined, the three countries have a total population of less than 1.5 million, fewer people than metropolitan Milwaukee. The great majority lives on the coast; most have never visited the hinterlands. Virtually none of the ethnic groups get along with each other. The region’s history serves up warfare by the decade. But they have had enough contact over four centuries to evolve, in Suriname, a form of Pidgin English called “Talkie-talkie.”

Nor is the violence restricted to human versus human. For example, Gimlette writes of Guyana’s kabouri fly, a “sort of microscopic mugger, slyly inconspicuous until the very moment it dove its white-hot pin deep beneath the flesh.” But as his guide Hubert tell him, “this wasn’t the worst of them. ‘If a screw worm gets inside a dog’s head … it will eat it from the inside out.’ ” Wild Coast is shot through with such descriptions of nature.

French Guiana — Guyane in French — is considered part of France and relies heavily on the French for all things economic, material and governmental. Although French Guiana exports almost nothing, even to France, the colony is considered a département, as French as Ardennes, Saint-Denis or Côtes d’Amour. French Guiana is also home to Ille St. Joseph, which in 1895 became the island prison of the French Jew falsely convicted of espionage, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. Nearby is Ile du Diable, home to the characters Michael Caine and Dustin Hoffman played in the movie “Papillon.”

In a lively, very British style, Gimlette provides an energetic look at one of the world’s most forgotten regions. But if your taste in travel runs to 2-star hotels or better, you won’t want to use his book as a travel guide. If, on the other hand, you consider yourself among the intrepid, this book and this journey are for you.

More than 1,000 miles to the southwest of the Guianas as a crow flies — that would be one bold crow — beats the heart of ancient Peru, the Inca capital of Cusco. Mark Adams, a Chicagoan who has worked for years as a magazine editor and writer in New York, leads us there and to nearby Machu Picchu in a journey of adventure travel that most people over 45 probably won’t want to attempt in the same manner as Adams did.

He decided to follow the trail of Hiram Bingham III, the adventurer-scholar who “discovered” Machu Picchu in the name of Yale University. A scion of one of the missionary families that helped “develop” Hawaii and then made sure it was handed over to the United States, Bingham, to the dismay of his father, decided to abandon missionary work for adventure and travel. Some Hollywood scholars believe he was the model for Indiana Jones. Adams doubts it.

In 1911, Bingham wondered whether Machu Picchu might have been the site where Inca refugees escaped in 1532 from Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish commander who was more mobster than soldier. Adams wondered whether Machu Picchu was instead a fortress or a religious center.

Along with his guide, a delightful, antisocial Australian survivalist named John Leivers, Adams forsakes the tourist train and the Inca Trail that “sounded as crowded as the George Washington Bridge at rush hour.” He writes that “the best parts of Bingham’s [turgid] books were those sections describing Peru’s natural beauty, and I was hoping to get a sense of Peru as Bingham had seen it, if such a thing still existed.”

It did, in a form only somewhat more civilized than that faced by Gimlette in the Guianas. In Turn Right at Machu Picchu, Adams toggles between Peruvian history and his 2009 adventure as he describes the trip itself and his own interpretation of why Machu Picchu existed. On the way, the reader meets rowdy, coca-chewing muleteers and a cook named Justo.

At one point Adams is invited to sip cocktails and dine with someone he calls “Mr. Super Travel Guy” and the man’s wife. Adams is tempted, but feels he can’t partake: “Having Justo watch me eat another cook’s food would have felt like taking part in a live sex act in Amsterdam.”

Although the style of the book is breezy, Adams manages to describe some pretty deep ancient history as well as modern issues affecting the place. His tale is a rewarding experience for readers who can keep up with the labyrinth of characters, place names and events ancient and modern.

A veteran journalist and teacher, Robert Knight is the author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft (Marion Street Press, 2010).

BUY Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge from Amazon.com

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