Ancient Ruins and New Friends

Hot off my adventures in Mancora, I headed south down the pacific coast to Trujillo, a decent sized city located just off the coast. While I had heard that Trujillo was a nice city in its own right, the real draw for me was its location next to a number of ancient ruins dating as far back as 100BC.

I arrived in Trujillo at 6:00am following an 8 hour overnight bus ride from Mancora, in which the movie selection consisted of any Patrick Swazye movie from the 80's (can you say yes!). Upon arriving in Trujillo, I soon realized that apart from a pretty nice central plaza, the city left a lot to be desired. Thus, I decided to trek out to a small neighboring fishing village, Huanchaco (pronounced Juan-Cha-Ko), to find a place to stay. I figured if nothing else I could go for a dip in the ocean and eat some good local seafood. I managed to find a hostel for $3.00/night and was then ready to rock and roll!

Beach at Huanchaco; those weird looking objects are the reed boats the local fisherman use

To see all of my pictures from Trujillo / Huanchaco click here!

The next day after stuffing myself full of seafood, I decided to put on my archeologist hat and go take a look at some of the ancient ruins located around Huanchaco and Trujillo. My first stop was the ancient city of Chan Chan. This ancient city was built by the Chimor people around 850AD and was absolutely huge. Everything is completely made from adobe brick and the picture below shows the outside of about only 1/10 of the city.

The outer walls of Chan Chan

After paying the admissions fee, I got a glimpse of the inside of the city and it was very impressive. Between the burial tombs and the human sacrifice areas there was a lot to see and learn. Therefore, I decided to ever so slyly join a tour group that had a guide who knew what she was talking about (doing this legitimately would have cost $2.00, but come on I'm on budget). That worked for a while until the guide started giving me questioning looks, I think it might of had something to do with the group being an elementary school class.

In the room where they used to do human sacrifices

As I took my leave, I ran into 3 Chileans who were wondering around aimlessly much like me. We struck up a conversation and attempted to follow the self guided tour around the ruins. As we were wondering around we ran into a rather odd couple: a Peruvian named Alex and his Swedish girlfriend Anna. We got to talking and it turned out that Alex was actually a Peruvian tourist guide on vacation. He loved everything Peruvian and took it upon himself to give all of us a little tour of Chan Chan!

From left: Carmela, Daniela, Juan-Carlos, Anna, and Alex, our pseudo tour-guide

Alex was also something of a self proclaimed comedian. Unfortunately for me, it was February 14th (guys if your confused, just ask any girl why that date's important) and there was only one other single person in our little impromptu crew, Carmela. Thus for the rest of day I had to bear the brunt of jokes aimed at why I was not asking out the ever so beautiful Carmela seeing as how it was Valentines Day. It was all in good fun though, although at some points I thought they might be serious..

The next day we all got together again and went to visit another set of ruins, these being two huge Pyramids called the Sun Pyramid and Moon Pyramid which were built by the Moche culture (100BC-650AD). These were incredibly impressive and were built even before the city of Chan-Chan. Once again led by our impromptu tour guide Alex we got the inside scoop on everything Ancient Peru.

The pyramid of the Moon

Everyone with the pyramid in the background

It turns out both of these pyramids are still active archeological sites and we even got a behind the scenes glimpse of the current excavations that are currently being done. Alex explained to us though that the excavations are completely funded by the meager entrance fee ($5.00) charged to tourists that visit the sights. The government provides no funding as it is evidently political suicide to allocate funds to ancient ruins when there is rampant poverty that could use that same money. If you ask me though, that's a relatively short sighted perspective as investing in these attractions would help bring in more tourists whose money could help create jobs and in doing so reduce the poverty (Two birds with one stone anyone?). But I digress..

In other news, that night while I was eating my delicious dinner I heard a CRUNCH that I didn't think came from rice and shrimp I was eating. I spit out what I was eating sure enough there was a nice little pebble in my food. Unfortunately for me, that little pebble took a pretty decent chunk of one my teeth with it! Thankfully though you can't see the chip as it's in one of my back teeth, but if anyone knows a good South American dentist let me know!

That night after saying goodbye to a part of my tooth and my new found friends, I took a bus from Trujillo up into the Andes Mountains to Huaraz, Peru. For as the bumper sticker on my Uncle Karl's ski rack said, "Life's a Mountain, Not a Beach." More to come from Huaraz soon!