Never take rides from strangers!
Karen has already posted an entry on Chan Chan, one of the many archaeological sites near Trujillo, in northern Peru.
We visited some other sights like Huaca de la Luna, which was quite impressive. Some of the color that remains on the walls is really striking. Here are some various views around Huaca de la Luna.
And across the way you can see Huaca del Sol, which was the largest structure in all of the Americas before the Spanish arrived. One third of it has washed away, but you can still see its impressive size. It is currently off limits to visitors. You can also see how excavation work continues around both huacas.
Another sight in the Trujillo area is El Brujo, a sight similar to Huaca de la Luna. El Brujo was only discovered in the past 20 years and is still undergoing excavation. As of now it is fairly difficult to reach and attracts very few visitors (very few visitors make it to all the amazing sights in northern Peru, instead concentrating their efforts in southern Peru). In the visitor logbook at El Brujo, it looked like they went days without receiving a single visitor! When we were there, we had the place to ourselves, along with our local guide (our hotel owner) and two German ladies from our hotel.
It was quite interesting to visit the site, as with the local guide you could go almost anywhere you wanted, as long as you paid the armed guards a bit at the end. At first they seemed concerned with you taking photos etc., but once they knew there was money in it for them, they were less concerned and opened locked parts of the site for us. Their main concern was for the other workers down below not to see us and know that they were taking bribes and letting in tourists to restricted areas. Interestingly, the restricted areas were the best parts of the site, so if you didn´t get to go in there, you´d be disappointed. The restricted parts had walls with amazing colors on them remaining after centuries. Another cool aspect of visiting the site was the fact that textiles and broken ceramics absolutely littered the site and were everywhere you walked. If you were so inclined, you could take home lots of thousand year old souvenirs and no one would be the wiser.
I won´t try to explain all the imagery (because frankly I´ve forgotten most of the explanations), but I think most of them are amazing enough without any descriptions.
Getting to El Brujo is quite an ordeal and originally we weren´t going to go because it´s very expensive to arrange a tour. But two German ladies staying at our hotel had shipped their car from Germany and are spending two years driving around South and North America. They mentioned they were going to El Brujo and then driving north to our next stop, Chiclayo, so we asked them for a ride, as it would allow us to visit the site and also get to Chiclayo without taking another bus.
Well, just leaving Trujillo was an ordeal as the car was making noises so we stopped by a mechanic, jumped the queue, had the wheels re-aligned and air pumped in the tires. The cost? Absolutely free! The lady tipped the guys 10 soles (3 dollars) and they were more than pleased. Amazing.
Anyway, we did manage to see the amazing El Brujo site 60 kms north of Trujillo and then dropped off our guide to take the bus back to town. Five minutes after dropping off the guide, the German ladies turn to us and say "so, where you guys headed?". Huh? "Um, we´re headed to Chiclayo with you". "Oh, we´re not going to Chiclayo, we´re heading inland a bit". Hmmm... they never mentioned any of this in the preceding 24 hours. Well, in the end after lots of asking around with various locals we managed to find a small town before the turn off inland where the ladies could drop us off and we took a bus to Chiclayo. A bit of unnecessary drama, but we made it where we wanted to go in the end. But it turns out that your mother was right as usual: you should never take rides from strangers! We weren´t worried about two 60-something year old ladies causing problems, but they did provide us with unnecessary headache. It would have been simpler just for us to take the bus from Trujillo to Chiclayo and skip El Brujo.
Finally, here´s a picture of the famous hairless Peruvian dog. Man, are these things ugly! But apparently they have a higher body temp than most other dogs, so apparently they are good to sleep with on cold Andean nights. No thanks!!
We visited some other sights like Huaca de la Luna, which was quite impressive. Some of the color that remains on the walls is really striking. Here are some various views around Huaca de la Luna.
And across the way you can see Huaca del Sol, which was the largest structure in all of the Americas before the Spanish arrived. One third of it has washed away, but you can still see its impressive size. It is currently off limits to visitors. You can also see how excavation work continues around both huacas.
Another sight in the Trujillo area is El Brujo, a sight similar to Huaca de la Luna. El Brujo was only discovered in the past 20 years and is still undergoing excavation. As of now it is fairly difficult to reach and attracts very few visitors (very few visitors make it to all the amazing sights in northern Peru, instead concentrating their efforts in southern Peru). In the visitor logbook at El Brujo, it looked like they went days without receiving a single visitor! When we were there, we had the place to ourselves, along with our local guide (our hotel owner) and two German ladies from our hotel.
It was quite interesting to visit the site, as with the local guide you could go almost anywhere you wanted, as long as you paid the armed guards a bit at the end. At first they seemed concerned with you taking photos etc., but once they knew there was money in it for them, they were less concerned and opened locked parts of the site for us. Their main concern was for the other workers down below not to see us and know that they were taking bribes and letting in tourists to restricted areas. Interestingly, the restricted areas were the best parts of the site, so if you didn´t get to go in there, you´d be disappointed. The restricted parts had walls with amazing colors on them remaining after centuries. Another cool aspect of visiting the site was the fact that textiles and broken ceramics absolutely littered the site and were everywhere you walked. If you were so inclined, you could take home lots of thousand year old souvenirs and no one would be the wiser.
I won´t try to explain all the imagery (because frankly I´ve forgotten most of the explanations), but I think most of them are amazing enough without any descriptions.
Getting to El Brujo is quite an ordeal and originally we weren´t going to go because it´s very expensive to arrange a tour. But two German ladies staying at our hotel had shipped their car from Germany and are spending two years driving around South and North America. They mentioned they were going to El Brujo and then driving north to our next stop, Chiclayo, so we asked them for a ride, as it would allow us to visit the site and also get to Chiclayo without taking another bus.
Well, just leaving Trujillo was an ordeal as the car was making noises so we stopped by a mechanic, jumped the queue, had the wheels re-aligned and air pumped in the tires. The cost? Absolutely free! The lady tipped the guys 10 soles (3 dollars) and they were more than pleased. Amazing.
Anyway, we did manage to see the amazing El Brujo site 60 kms north of Trujillo and then dropped off our guide to take the bus back to town. Five minutes after dropping off the guide, the German ladies turn to us and say "so, where you guys headed?". Huh? "Um, we´re headed to Chiclayo with you". "Oh, we´re not going to Chiclayo, we´re heading inland a bit". Hmmm... they never mentioned any of this in the preceding 24 hours. Well, in the end after lots of asking around with various locals we managed to find a small town before the turn off inland where the ladies could drop us off and we took a bus to Chiclayo. A bit of unnecessary drama, but we made it where we wanted to go in the end. But it turns out that your mother was right as usual: you should never take rides from strangers! We weren´t worried about two 60-something year old ladies causing problems, but they did provide us with unnecessary headache. It would have been simpler just for us to take the bus from Trujillo to Chiclayo and skip El Brujo.
Finally, here´s a picture of the famous hairless Peruvian dog. Man, are these things ugly! But apparently they have a higher body temp than most other dogs, so apparently they are good to sleep with on cold Andean nights. No thanks!!
posted by Kevin at 6/16/2007 04:20:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home