Chachapoyas

Another night bus and another night with no sleep! Nine long hours of winding up into the mountains. This time heading north east up to the Amazonas region, in the far north of Peru. Chachapoyas is a small but busy town and it's very isolated as there are no flights to this place after there was a plane crash a few years ago. The town is surrounded by mountains and cloud forest and we felt like we had arrived in a different country when we staggered off the bus. And it was humid - damp even! It had been raining; we hadn't had any rain for weeks!

We were met at the bus station at 6am by our guide, Jose, and we were lucky enough to be able to check straight into our hotel, have a shower and breakfast, before starting our tour at 8.30. I then felt surprisingly civilised given that I hadn't had any sleep!

The first day of our tour was a trip into the mountains to see some sarcophagi perched high up on cliffs. Very few are left as so many have been destroyed, but these ones are now being protected. One of the Chachapoya ethnic groups buried their dead in mummy bundles in these sarcophagi on high inaccessible mountain cliffs - to protect them for their after life. We couldn't get close - you'd need to absail down the cliffs to do that!

On the way back a quick detour to a breathtaking canyon!

The next day was a trip into the cloud forest proper - with a six-hour hike to Gocta falls. It was warm and damp in the clouds - and then a lot wetter when it rained. And it rained on and off all day so we got properly wet - at least it was a chance to use all the wet-weather gear that we had packed and not used until now!

Our guide is a keen bird watcher so we stopped frequently to watch birds - we didn't find toucans or the famous cock of the rocks, but hummingbirds and other multi- coloured birds made up for that. And Gocta falls was well worth the hike - it would be the world's third highest waterfall if it didn't stop and start again part way down, but even the bottom part is on the world's top 20! We thought we'd exhausted all our enthusiasm for waterfalls at Iguazu, but this one had plenty of wow factor too!





We then drove deeper into the countryside up the Utcubamba valley to find the hotel where we would stay for the next two nights. We arrived to find there was no electricity for the first hour or so, soit was showers by candlelight!

The next day we hiked for about four hours to visit the cliffs of Revash where there are a groups of small mausoleums that used to contain mummy bundles - again, most of these have been raided, but the ones in Revash are some of the best preserved.





Then for our last day of the tour and a day trip to Kuelap - the biggest pre-Inca site in South America. It's up on a very remote mountain top, a four-mile hike straight up or a two-hour drive around a winding mountain track. We took the drive, which had the added advantage of a stop to watch some humming birds along the way - including the rare marvellous spatutail. Very difficult birds to photograph asthey move so quickly!

We spent about five hours wandering round Kuelap - it's an enourmous site surrounded by high walls, with hundreds of circular stone buildings and a temple inside. Numerous human remains were found in the walls as well as in and near the temple, and it's not clear exactly what the site was built for and why the Chachapoyas people died out. Mysterious and fascinating, and a good way to end our trip.

 

Then for one final very long bus journey back down to Chiclayo - and with two emergency stops to change punctures along the way! And after a flight to Lima, one final and very delicious lunch with Ana Maria & Francisco, before the rather tedious flights back to Madrid and then on to London.

It's been a good trip, with amazing natural and man-made wonders along the way. Looking forward to sorting out all the photos and revisiting the highlights!

Adios!
Hazel x

Trujillo and Chiclayo

Trujillo
Bleary eyed after our overnight bus ride, we reached our hotel in Trujillo at 6am and luckily the room was ready so we went to sleep for three hours! Then we were more in the mood to explore and we headed to the coast to a fishing town called Huanchaco. My Rough Guide described it as a village but the book is 10 years old, and by now it's more of a sprawling town that has merged with Trujillo suburbs! The sea was still there though and down in the old centre, there's a nice pier and fishermen still use traditional reed boats. It's now also a popular surfing centre, and we sat and enjoyed watching the fishermen and surfers. The sea here is too cold for swimmers at this time of year sadly for me! Only another five hours up the coast and it would be warm enough...

The sun didn't come out for us, but the town was preparing for a festival that evening, and huge firework displays were being constructed in the main street and a Latin band was practising. We sat and watched and thought about returning that night to join in the festivities.

After a nice seafood lunch we headed back into Trujillo and wandered round the centre. There's a nice colonial centre and a huge square - apparently the biggest in Peru. But not a lot else to offer tourists, and we had been warned that we should be careful here - it's a huge city and has a reputation for being unsafe. We stuck to the centre and we were fine.

Then for a day of visiting archaeological sites. First the pyramids of the sun and the moon just outside Trujillo - these vast adobe structures were built by the Moche people in about 500AD and although they look quite badly eroded from the outside, excavations have revealed a number of chambers inside with amazing decorative art. And there are numerous layers of adobe bricks as the Moche people kept on adding extra layers to the pyramid to make it bigger to please their gods.

Our second visit was to Chan Chan - an enormous Chimu city - or rather numerous cities - built in the desert between modern Trujillo and the sea. A lot of it has been eroded by the salt and wind, but one part has been well preserved for visitors. There were numerous passageways and rooms with carvings of sea animals and wave patterns, also huge courtyards and burial chambers. Each time a ruler died, the city was turned into a mausoleum and then a new city was built for the new ruler. Hence the site being so huge!

The tour finished with a trip back to the fishing town of Huanchaco to watch the sun set over the sea.

And then back to Trujillo to find a nice restaurant for dinner, but as it was Sunday night, nearly everything was closed, so we ended up resorting to McDonald's! The only thing local about it was the spicy aji sauce instead of ketchup!

Chiclayo
We headed for Chiclayo the next day, after a quick wander round the colonial houses in the centre of Trujillo. It was another long bus journey, mainly through desert with a few glimpses of the coast along the way. Chiclayo is a good four hours up the coast and it's the main city of the area, and is rapidly expanding, though the centre still has quite a small feel and we spotted very few other tourists.

We checked into a hostal with the tiniest rooms possible, but at least it was convenient as only one block away from the centre. We arrived in time to go out for dinner and found a nice traditional restaurant where we could try the local speciality - rice with duck. The rice with coriander was pretty heavy going, but it was a nice change to have duck after eating so much chicken! And we tried a bottle of Peruvian red wine which was surprising drinkable.

We managed to find a tour that took us to all the places we wanted to visit in one day - it was a long day, but a streamlined way of doing it. This was to be a day of tombs and museums with their contents. We started out with the museum in Sican to see the contents of two tombs found in some nearby Sican pyramids - a lot of the contents of the tombs had been stolen but these tombs had remained hidden until about 30 years ago, and some amazing pieces of gold were found.

We visited the pyramids afterwards. There were over 25 pyramids on the site - very eroded by wind, rain and time, and you needed a good imagination to work out how they might have looked! In fact if you hadn't been told they were man-made you might have thought they were natural. They were built to look like the mountains behind them after all. Unlike the pyramids in Trujillo, these pyramids were solid - in-filled with earth and rubble and then covered with adobe bricks, but a lot of the bricks have now worn away, leaving mounds of earth.

We then drove out to Lambayeque to another museum to see the contents of two tombs of the Lords of Sipan from the Moche era. These tombs were only found in the 1990s and a new museum was built in Lambayeque to display the contents - hundreds of ceramic pots, and more amazing gold masterpieces.

We then had a spare day in Chiclayo as we had managed to do all we had planned to do in one day! So we got a local bus out to the coast on search of a beach - but it was a bit of a cloudy day and very much out of season so we didn't find much to do there either! We strolled along the coast for a bit and then had a seafood lunch whilst looking out to sea - nice to get some sea air before our next overnight bus - this time to Chachapoyas for the last stage of our adventure...

Huaraz

We were persuaded to take the day bus to Huaraz, but the first four hours up the Panamerican were very dull. Luckily the last three hours made up for it by being much more scenic as the road turned inland and zig-zagged up into the mountains.

Huaraz sits at just over 3,000m between the Cordillera Negra and the Cordillera Blanca. But it's a fairly large town and was rebuilt in the 1970s after an earthquake so it doesn't have much of an up in the mountains away from it all feel! But it is a good base for treks and climbing and our hostel was full of people looking far more fit and intrepid than us! And on the fourth floor of the hostel there were great even if distant views of several 5,000m plus snow-capped peaks and including Huarascaran at 6768m. Views from the hostal...

The first full day there we were feeling a bit tired so we spent a day acclimatising to the altitude again - we spent the afternoon at some nearby thermal baths - and that was about all!

The next day we went on a tour to Chavin de Huantar - about three hours' drive through the mountains - to visit some more ruins. This time Moche ruins from around 800BC - a fantastic site with a huge pyramid containing tunnels and ceremonial rooms. And a great museum with some artefacts showing off the wonderful Moche art. But it was all somewhat spoilt by the guide from hell who treated us like school kids and marched us round at a silly pace and got stroppy if we dared to stop to look at anything he wasn't talking about!

Next, we made up for our lack of exercise with a full day's walk up to 3,700m in the Cordillera Negra where we could get some good views of the Cordillera Blanca. It wasn't that high but I really struggled with the heat and the altitude.

The next day we had planned an even bigger walk but we delayed it a day as David's stomach wasn't behaving and I was quite happy to have another quiet day - maybe we should have trained a bit more before coming out here! It was worth leaving it a day as we were then feeling much better again, so then it was off for the big walk - leaving Huaraz at 6am, three hours' drive up to 4,000m, then off up to 4,600m! Most people with us were half our age and scampered up, but I was somewhat slower though still made it! Now cooler, the altitude wasn't quite as hard as on the previous walk. And it was worth the effort as the 6,000m peaks around us were gorgeous - and the lake at the highest point of our walk was a spectacular blue colour - the photo doesn't really do it justice!

Once back in Huaraz it was time to repack, shower, have dinner (alpaca, a bit chewy!), and catch our night bus to Trujillo. We were delayed before we started as three passengers missed the bus and then, by catching a taxi, managed to get in front of the bus and sit on the road until they were let on the bus! The police were called and the bus company eventually gave in and let them on half an hour later. We still managed to arrive in Trujillo half an hour early, which we really didn't want as it was only 5am, hmm. David managed to get some sleep on the bus, can't say I did!

Lima

As both of us had already visited southern Peru before, we flew from La Paz straight to Lima to stay with friends of mine before heading further north. We stayed with Ana Maria and Francisco for three nights and we were spoilt with guided tours, delicious meals out, and getting our clothes washed!

We explored the districts of Barranco and Miraflores out near the coast - where we had a really delicious lunch of ceviche, and other fishy delicacies.

We also enjoyed Sunday brunch with the extended family - and got to try Lima's buttifara sandwiches and tamales - cooked corn paste with chicken.

And Francisco took us on an in-depth tour of downtown Lima, now a bit tired but was once a very elegant centre, with palaces and other grand buildings with impressive wooden balconies.

Then it was time to pack up again and head north to Huaraz on the bus...

Potosi, Sucre and La Paz

After Uyuni, the highlight of which was the train cemetary (!), we headed for Potosi.

Potosi

The guide book said it would take six hours to reach Potosi,so we were bracing ourselves for yet another long bus ride. But the road has recently been upgraded and is new tarmac all the way, so it only took four hours - and the journey was spectacular. First we headed up into the hills, with good views back across the salt flats, then we gradually climbed up and up into the mountains, up over 4,000m again, and with great views all around.

We weren´t expecting much of Potosi, we were really only breaking the journey between Uyuni and Sucre. But it was a pleasant surprise - warm and sunny even though at 4,100m, and there were some lovely colonial streets to wander around.

We also managed to go on a guided tour of the Mint which was fascinating. Did you know that the $ symbol originated from Potosi, when the colonial silver coins were stamped with the overprinted letters P T S I for Potosi, thus making the first $ symbol?

Sucre

The next day we headed for Sucre, earlier than we'd hoped as there weren't many bus options. At least this meant that we arrived on the afternoon, in time to have a look round before dark and settle into our hotel which was a really lovely colonial house - here's David looking out of our bedroom window...

Sucre is known as the White City because of all its white-washed colonial buildings, mainly churches. It has a very nice central plaza and it has a relaxed and friendly feel, even though it's a large city. The streets here are wider and grander than in Potosi.

We had a couple of days here, and moved fairly slowly, wandering up the local hill to admire the city views, wandering around the colonial buildings, and exploring a few squares and parks. We also visited an indigenous art museum and leant a lot about textiles - and I weakened and bought one!

La Paz

Then to La Paz, this time by plane, and the landing was dramatic to say the least - we swooped in over the Andes and landed on a thin landing strip in El Alto, a city in its won right at 4,000m, and it has the highest airport in the world. Then for a taxi down to La Paz, at a mere 3,600m! It took us a few hours to acclimatize to the altitude, and to the hustle and bustle of a huge sprawling city - houses all the way up the steep hillside, unless the rock is just too crumbly! We enjoyed wandering round the markets, where you could buy just about anything - there was even a witches' market selling potions and llama fetuses!

We met up with Nicky and Graham who we had met in Potosi and we arranged to go on the same day trip with them to visit a pre-Inca site at Tiwanaku - down near Lake Titicaca, this site was once the biggest city in South America. As with other sites, a lot was now in ruins and not always clear how things would have looked originally - but there was still enough of a huge pyramid and some temples to make this an impressive site.

We spent an enjoyable last evening with Nicky and Graham - and tried llama steaks with a bottle of Bilivian malbec - all surprisingly tasty!

We wandered around the old city the morning before flying to Lima, and we luckily coincided with Andean new celebrations in the main square! Lots of speeches, music and dancing - and loads of people out in traditional dress for the occasion. We rounded off the morning with some traditional La Paz food - saltenas, a bit like spicy pasties!