Valley of the Old Ones

This photo of Vilcabamba is courtesy of TripAdvisor

It was so long ago I can hardly remember. This image comes close. Sadly my very serviceable Pentax 35mm SLR was stolen by my guide and bearer, along with all the film, but then perhaps in his view it was merely a gratuity of sorts. The year I can remember well enough: 1972. It was a winter weekend at a friend's gentrified farmhouse in upstate New York. We were reading the New York Times Sunday Edition. There was a headline story in one of the inner sections referencing a recent article in National Geographic--a magazine I'd been reading since childhood, mostly for the pictures. The story was about longevity--a topic of little interest to me, being a twenty-something at the time. But then one of my favorite Beatles songs was 'When I'm Sixty Four' and there was a lot of pathos in that song, and let's face it, we all have, or have had aging parents and/or relatives. According to the authors, a noted anthropologist and/or gerontologist had discovered three isolated corners of the world in which people lived to be, well, really old. One was in the Soviet Union, somewhere in the Caucasus. One was in Khazakstan in the Himalayas. And the other was in Ecuador: Vilcabamba, to be exact.

I was on a plane the next day, literally, from my home base in New York to Loja Province, Ecuador. I found it on the map, and found a way to get there via Miami, then Panama City, through Quito, then Guayaquil. I traveled lightly: a duffel with personal stuff, my spring-wound 16mm Bolex camera with interchangeable lenses, and a German Uher tape recorder (I couldn't afford a Nagra). I bought 24 rolls of film, a dozen 6" reels of tape, and a one way ticket.

Quito was nestled in a high valley at 10,000 feet in altitude. It was ancient: originally the northernmost capital of the Inca empire (Cuzco was the southern capital). There were mountains high above to the East, and I hired a driver to take me up there. I wish I'd saved the film. No snow-capped peaks, these: they were still tree-lined. But we found a cleared area along the ridge, and stopped cold. What we were looking out at, up at, at a distance I could hardly fathom, was a huge volcano called Cotopaxi, some two hundred miles away across a vast jungle landscape that was, I was told, the Amazon basin. I could see the whole panorama like I was on a space capsule. The air was perfectly clear, there was no industry, or even urban 'civilization' for about 5000 miles. And then, looking south, I could see another volcano, much further, then another, and another, for another thousand miles. Each was well over 20,000 feet in altitude, many were steaming, and they were the visible backbones of an entire continent. I have never seen another image like those I saw and photographed that day, and which images were now lost.

But there was more: there was a small switchback road down the other side of that 14,000 Cordillera that followed a seemingly endless trail of waterfalls straight down the mountainside into deeper and deeper jungle. These waterfalls were the headwaters of the Amazon River, and they were right on the Equator. This, I realized, was the real-life locale for Arthur Conan Doyle''s The Lost World, which I would later on adapt for Jack Arnold at Universal Studios.

From Quito I flew south to Guayaquil, where I had my wristwatch forcibly ripped off of my arm while riding in a taxi with the window open. I went to a bar for a drink and got propositioned by a long secession of prostitutes I'd mistaken for available free-spirited young 'Chicas.' Live and learn.

The connection to Loja was on a DC-3 with twin engines that labored to climb the cordillera to the central valley. I wondered if it was the last DC-3 still in service. It wasn't. About half way along the 200 mile or so flight inland we passed another DC-3 flying the opposite direction, directly beneath us. We missed it by about 100 feet. I wondered if the pilotas waved to each other and did this fly-by on a daily basis. I hoped not.

In Loja I hired my larcenous guide and driver, and we headed north to the now-famous village of Vilcabamba, population (more or less) 100.

Apparently a Japanese television film crew had gotten there ahead of me, but it didn't matter. I was entranced. And welcomed as though I'd been the first outsider ever to venture that far (except a hippy living in a nearby orange grove named 'Johnny Lovewisdom.') The natives were all mixed blood: half Spanish Conquistadore, half Inca.

Armed with only my cameras and high school Spanish, I ended up staying and filmed for three months, fell in and out of love several times, saw no one but the villagers and their elders, who were definitely old. But then the records were dubious and I had to take their word for it (and that of the local priest, who showed me the church records with lots of names and dates, for whatever that was worth--the word of God?). But they were definitely old. So I named my subsequent film Valley of the Old Ones, brought it back to New York, sold it to Time Life Films (now HBO), which licensed it to ABC, which hired Peter Graves to read my narration, and the rest is history. Harper's Magazine interviewed me for a cover story that June. It was my first 15 minutes of fame.

Vilcabama itself is now probably more famous than I (or Peter Graves, for that matter), and one of the prime destinations for the nouveau world traveler or adventurous health-seeking retiree (I've actually and coincidentally enountered two in my Six Degrees of Separation). My film is somewhere in a vault, no doubt, in the dungeons of the Time Life Building in Manhattan, whatever form or name it now bears today. I did try to revive a VHS copy recently, but it wouldn't play. I do have the original negative reels somewhere, and I'm thinking of going back there one of these years, if I can afford it, and even tried to pitch that idea to National Geographic back in 2002. But never mind. Maybe I'll wait another nine years or so and do a 50th anniversary revisit thing. I'm still feeling very young myself, I want you to know. I think it was the water...