Trujillo
PERU
Cuz you Chan Chan Chan!!!
By LYNDI
Friday, February 20, 2008
Knowing that I only had about one week left in my trip before I would have to head back to Cuzco, I knew my stop in Trujillo would be brief. I’d looked online and in all sorts of guidebooks for a good place to stay in Trujillo, but couldn’t find one single review of a hostel – so I ended up blindly picking Chan Chan Inn to the north of the city. It turned out to be just okay – kinda a stuffy room, but safe and only s./25 per night for a single. For some reason I did something I’d never done before – I booked a tour to see the sites of Chan Chan and Huaca de Luna at the hotel for s./35 without going to a single tour agency to compare prices. I’m not sure what had gotten into me. I saw an ad and signed up. Very un-Lyndi-like. And the tour turned out to be good – although in extremely rapid Spanish so I only caught about 60% of it, and I’m sure I paid at least s./10 more than everyone else in my car that booked at the office. Duh.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For the first day in Trujillo I just walked around the town enjoying the “City of Eternal Spring” as it’s known, popping into cafés and other little shops. At one point I went outside the center city to find the Linea bus station so I could buy my overnight ticket to Huaraz for the following night. Apparently Trujillo’s center is built circularly, so if you start walking on a street (as I did when I wanted to head back into town), you may or may not hit the center. It may just take you the opposite way you want to go. Well, that, or my inter-directional compass is way off. But I’ll blame Trujillo’s colonial city planners. So after I had been walking literally in circles for an hour, some guy approaches me when I’m looking at a map to see if I need help. Well – I know this type. They distract you while their friend grabs your purse. Or he says he’ll take you to the center but instead leads you to his evil lair. Yes – I was still paranoid after the Chiclayo incident. But he insisted he wanted to practice his English so he would walk me there. Yeah – right. Then he’ll invite me to a light lunch at this place he knows that’s owned by his brother where everything costs $50 each. I’ve heard ’em all. But as it turned out, he was actually really friendly and honest. He works on a cruise ship for most of the year so likes to practice his English in his time off to keep up on his skills. We chatted for awhile and I thanked him for his earnest help. It made me realize how sad I’d become – I couldn’t even trust a really nice guy in a time when I genuinely needed help. But, I guess that’s the delicate line a single traveler walks – don’t trust until it’s too late? Not sure what the moral is there.
So an uneventful day, but I finally got to catch Aaron on the phone in Rio. We had been completely unsuccessful for the first week and a half of attempts, so I had a lot of boring stories to catch him up on. Hey – not having run into other backpackers for nearly a full week takes a toll on my social skills. After talking to him for about an hour, I ate dinner at a pizza parlor that a different girl I’d run into (yes – when I was lost again) worked at, and then went to bed.
And the next day was my tour to Chan Chan which I was really excited about. Chan Chan was built in the first century AD by the Chimu and is the biggest pre-Colombian city in Latin America. But first the tour took us to a nearby ruin called Huaca de Luna – which I didn’t know much about. Turns out Huaca de Luna is only 100 times more interesting than Chan Chan. For starters, Huaca was built by the Moche (the civilization preceeding the Chimu) for religious ceremonies. And I’m pretty sure the Moche are what Indiana Jones’ nemesis was based on. The Moche were the ones that sacrificed humans to their gods (although it was an honor, and usually one of the best warriors was chosen) in times of drought to ensure the life-sustaining rains. But they couldn’t just kill the warrior, could they? Our guide told stories of beating hearts being ripped out of chests, skin peeled off live sacrifices, limbs being cut off, humans being forced to drink their own blood, etc., etc. If pre-Inca civilizations were bad ’80s dramas – these guys were the A-Team. No one messed with them.
He showed us the Huaca de Luna sites that are now covered to protect them from the elements, but amazingly there is so much color left in the ruins. Apparently the Moche repeatedly built on top of their older structures instead of tearing them down, which has preserved the ruins underneath to near perfection since they were protected from the rain, wind, and snow. Okay – no snow in deserts. But still. He showed us the sacrificial sites and the ceremonial center, although as with many ruins – no one knows the whole truth since there was no written language and the population entirely died out. And how, you may ask? There’s the obvious battles and wars and disease, but apparently the Moche were quite promiscuous as well – men and women, men and children, men and sisters, men and animals – it was part of their culture and widely accepted. But as happens when you dip into your own gene pool too many times – deformities and retardation were plentiful. He said that most of the Moche died out due to this and “that disease that Abraham Lincoln had”. Huh? He didn’t have a disease – he had a bullet. But the guide insisted that Honest Abe had the same disease that ended up killing off a lot of the Moche and would have killed him too, although John Wilkes Boothe sped up the process. (I’ve looked it up since and it’s called “Marfan Syndrome”). Anyways, it’s when you are really tall and have extremely long limbs as well as sort of a caved-like chest. Fascinating.
At any rate, then we were off to Chan Chan – which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It is, in fact, an absolutely enormous pre-Incan city, but it’s all blocked off and guides can only take you through 1/8th of it. And, due to the desert climate, wind has eroded the vast majority of the city so that all you see now is sandy blocks. Nonetheless, there are some parts that are well-maintained and the carvings are well-intact, but it would have been more impressive if we’d not just seen amazing ruins. Plus, the Chimu didn’t rip out beating hearts or anything cool like that. They sorta got along – yawn.
We were dropped off again at the Plaza around 5pm, so I hit up a small café for dinner and then caught my nightbus for the freezing regions of Huaraz.
