Chachapoyas
PERU
Untouched - and Unvisited - Ancient Ruins
By LYNDI
Tuesday, February 17, 2008
Knowing that I would be arriving into the remote highland Peruvian town of Chachapoyas at 5:30am, I took the liberty to make reservations at a nice hotel in town. This, by the way, marking the first time I’d made reservations on our entire trip. But seeing as how a single blond girl walking aimlessly around a little town at the break of dawn may attract the wrong kind of attention, I figured now was a good time to start. So I read several online reviews and decided on Hotel Revash. The only problem was the listed prices – about s./60 (roughly US$20) for a single room. Luckily when I got there, being the middle of low season, my room was only s./35 – much better. While booking the room from Chiclayo, I also went ahead and booked a tour to the Kuelap fortress with their attached travel agency. So when I got in at 5:30, there was a friendly young man waiting to let me in where I passed out in my room for about an hour and a half, took a quick shower, and was ready for the 8am departure.
I hopped in a minivan with a Peruvian family, an Argentinian couple, and our guide Agosto. Normally this not only means that the tour will be in Spanish – but it will be in fast, slangy Spanish. Not my specialty. Luckily, Agosto was a great guide and took the time to explain everything in English even though I was the only one that needed the translation. The ride to Kuelap follows a long, windy road deep into the Utcubamba Valley and then right back up the other side taking about 3 hours in total. Luckily I had quite the talkative 10 year old Peruvian girl next to me to tell me all about her school and how her favorite class is gym class. Fascinating.
But speaking of fascinating, we finally arrived to the Kuelap fortress. I hadn’t heard much about Kuelap before I started researching stopping points in northern Peru – but I’m not sure why not. The fortress is a pre-Incan site built around 500 AD and only discovered by the western world in 1843 due to its remote location. Like many ruins in South America, the fortress was inhabited until the arrival of the Spanish around 1526. The Chachapoyas people were pretty bad neighbors, always fighting – and worse, winning – little battles with the other local civilizations. So when the Conquistadors rolled in, the nearby kingdom of Chimu made a bargain with the devil to join the Spanish and take down the Chachapoyans together. Well, it worked – or, more likely, the guns did. But as it will happen when you deal with the devil, about 80% of the Chimu ended up dying of diseases brought by the Spanish anyways, so I guess the Spaniards got to have their cake and eat it too.
At any rate, historians believe the Chachapoyans were good fighters due to the structure and layout of their fortress. The walls surrounding the little city are up to 20m high and it is believed that there are more stones in Kuelap than in the pyramids at Giza. Not sure who got stuck with the counting job, but still an impressive number. The ridiculous part is that they chose to build a fortress up on a big hill for strategic reasons – not practical. Therefore, every single stone laid in that fortress had to be brought up from a distant quarry and carried on the back of a worker – the trip would take one entire week per load. Per load! Beyond just big sturdy walls, they also had a trick up their sleeve for anyone trying to enter through one of the two entrances. As you race up the stairs, you come to the top to find that you are literally on the edge of a cliff, and they can tell many people just ran right off Wile E. Coyote style based on the number of bones they found at the bottom of the cliffside.
Agosto took us all through the three levels of the fortress, telling some good war stories with nearly every turn. Kuelap definitely ranks as my third favorite ruin after Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu – but funny enough, the ruins receive just 4,200 visitors per year. Whereas Machu Picchu can receive 4,200 visitors per day. So the solitude was actually pretty nice.
We got back to Chachapoyas around 5pm, and as soon as I stepped in the door to the hotel, the owners were asking if I would like to do another tour tomorrow to Karijia – which, actually, I was planning on going to on my own. I told them no thank you, today’s tour was great, but I can’t spend money on another tour. I went up to my room to relax a bit, and when I came back down, the price of the tour had just lowered by s./10. I knew the ball was in my court. No, thanks – I’ll just go on my own. I went out and got dinner, and yes, when I got back, the tour was even cheaper for the following morning. So I told the owners, I know the entry to the site is s./11, and I know transportation there is about s./5 in each direction, but I would like to have a guide at the site – especially if it would be Agosto. So I eventually bargained them down from s./80 for a full day tour to Karijia and a nearby scenic valley to s./45. They promised me a wake-up call at 7, back by 5pm so I could make my 9pm nightbus, and it was a done deal.
So when that 7am wake-up call came at 8am, I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed. There were 2 British travelers this time in my taxi, and a French family of 3 in another taxi and we headed out to Karijia. Again, it was approximately 3 hours to the site where the 7 of us walked down through a beautiful valley to a small waterfall. Way up on the side of the cliff were 5 sarcophagi in the shape of men. Apparently, the Chachapoyas people buried their dead in little, tight coffins, then built a sturdier wooden structure around it, and finally molded a man-shaped figure around it and added facial features, color, and other personal markings. Next they stood the sarcophagi on the edge of a cliff where they stand to this day. Through all the earthquakes, torrential rain, and human interaction – these 3m high statues stand perilously on the edge of a cliff retaining most of their color and all of their structure. Amazing. At this point, I was already glad I had taken the tour because the British couple was really friendly, Agosto had a ton of information, and it would have been really hard to get to on my own.
This rosy frame of mind would shortly change… After lunch in a small town, we headed off to the scenic valley that I can’t remember the name of. Maybe because we never got there. About an hour in to the drive it started to rain. Then pour. Then shovels of rain. Seeing as how we were in Toyota taxis on mud, pot-hole filled roads, I sensed this would be a problem. And, sure enough, our wheels began to spin shortly thereafter. Long story short, we spent the next 2 1/2 hours trying to dig our taxis out of the mud. We built little bridges, dug moats and little rivers, pushed, pulled, rocked back and forth – all to no avail. We were all soaked, covered in mud, and exhausted by the time the light began to fade, so the choice to abandon the one stuck taxi was easy. We left that car there in the middle of the road as a punishment for its stubbornness and climbed into the one taxi we were able to free. So we rambled along, cold and hungry. Eventually Chachapoyas was within just a few miles, but no – it couldn’t be that easy.
We arrived at the last bridge we needed to cross, only to find it was completely blocked by a small semi-truck that had wedged its tires around one of the entry poles. How, you ask? A damn miracle, that’s how. The front tires couldn’t go backwards and the back tires couldn’t go forwards because the pole’s cement base was in between them. I don’t get it either. At this point, it’s almost 9pm and my nightbus is a distant memory. The clincher here is that it’s the only bridge and the driver is nowhere in sight. So there’s absolutely no way to cross the bridge. There’s about 6 or 7 cars pulled up waiting to cross, so I tell my driver, “Hey – why don’t we turn around and go another way in to town?”. He rolls his eyes and replies “No, we’ll just have to wait”. Huh? Wait for what? The driver to come back? Someone to push it out of the way? For someone to build a new bridge??? So at this point, the French family and I cross the bridge on foot to find a tiny little village where no one has a car and no taxis pass. So we wait. About half an hour later a taxi passes with a few people already inside, but we all cram in regardless and literally crawl about 10km/hr up the hill to Chachapoyas. Luckily, the hotel staff realized we were delayed – I guess we weren’t the mud’s first victims – rebooked a room for me that night, and moved my stuff in, and rebooked my bus ticket for the next day. It was a nice touch, I must admit.
And so. I slept in, ate a late breakfast, checked out of my room at 1pm, and then spent the next 8hrs trying to entertain myself in a little city not meant for entertaining tourists. No bars, no cafes, no restaurants except for little hole-in-the-wall diners, no cinemas – nothing. And no other tourists in sight. I finally found refuge in the lobby of some hotel and drank a cold beer while reading for hours on end. Boooooooring!!! But at least I was well prepared for my nightbus that night – in fact I was counting down the seconds til it left out of sheer boredom. Had everything worked out and I’d have spent two days touring the Chachapoyas countryside and not had a mudbath or an extra day to do nothing – it would have been absolutely perfect. But we all know that’s not the Peruvian way. And despite it all, it was an amazing pit stop in my trek across northern Peru.
