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...
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