Ahhh Trujillo....
A night of nightmarish luxury brought us to Trujillo. We took an overnight semi`cama (semi bed) bus from Huaraz to Trujillo. The service includes reclining chairs with foot/leg-rests, snacks, drinks, a stewardess and a bathroom! All this luxury, how could you not sleep? I guess you have to remember that the first four hours of this 10 hour trip is winding through steep mountain passes to get to the coast. This time is spent between being flung from one side of the bus to the other.
We arrived in Trujillo around 630am and checked into Casa De Clara. It is a family run house owned by an Englishman and his Peruvian wife. Collectively they speak about a billlion languages. The house is pretty run down, but the owners do tours in english of the nearby ruins and so we decided to stay.
Yesterday we visited Chan Chan which is a giant ruin of a Chimu city. It was built in AD1300, and it´s highest structures were once over 10m high. The ruins are massive in size and scale and stretch several kms in either direction in the destert. Construction was made of mud and adobe and there are still some intact sculptings and reliefs. I would say it was worth it to have the english tour, but Micheal has been doing this for about 18 years now, and I think it is about 8 years too many. He gets into a monotone dialogue which is about as painless as doing a marathon, or a non-stop sesson of all my Iconography classes combined from my degree. He just knows way too much about everything, and has lost touch with presenting it in an interesting way. Information overload!!
Nevertheless, life was easy going with him to site, so we opted to go the next day with him to the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. There were some amazing discoveries of murals and reliefs at these pyramids, with colours and paints still intact and it was amazing to see. All are set in the desert, but with ever increasing irrigated and reclaimed farm land.
Trujillo is a busy city, the biggest in the north of Peru. There are tons of taxis wiring around town, and once again we cannot remain anonymous. We are stopped walking around the busy parts of town by people wanting to practise their english, and otherwise trying to either sell something or probably trying to rip us off.
We have still been suffering the stomach issues, which has made life interesting.
Our plan is to head to the border tonight. We are catching a bus to Tumbes tonight which will arrive tomorrow morning. This is right on the border with Ecuador. We hope to get through the border, and catch a bus to Guayquil that same day. From there we might have to spend the night and head the next day to Puerto Lopez on the Ecuadorian coast.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment