Trujillo day two: mud pyramids, a mud city and boobies by the sea

This was another great day!

After breakfast, we moved our bags to the Colonial Hotel – cheaper and more cosy, then walked the 4½ blocks to the Cruz del Sur bus station to book the overnight Saturday bus back to Lima, and then had a brisk walk back to our original hotel ready to be picked up by our tour company. We were a bigger group of tourists this time but, HUGE luck, most of the other visitors were Spanish-speaking and had their own guide and we had the lovely Henry again, just for us – happy, knowledgeable, laughing Henry!

We headed out of town to Huaca de la Luna, another pyramid of the ancient Moche culture. We went first to the site museum where we had just 30 minutes to go round the exhibits, mostly ceramics here, rather than the gold and silver of other sites, but equally as rich in their decoration, their depiction of rituals, beliefs and everyday life. There were stunning anthropomorphic designs but also images of animals and people, and the museum contained some fascinating reconstructions and explanations of the deceased and their grave deposits, the local people and their professions.

The Huaca del Sol (not able to be visited) and Huaca de la Luna pyramids were centres of power for the local Moche people, El Sol a political and administrative centre and La Luna a centre for religious ceremonies. Between the two was a city, with wide avenues and narrow alleys, grand squares, houses and palaces. Our wander around Huaca de la Luna was fascinating. The various excavations have revealed layer upon layer of temples, a tomb containing over 40 sacrificed warriors, and a huge and remarkable wall of still colourful murals.

After a delicious lunch at the surprisingly good tourist restaurant El Sombrero, we headed off to more ruins, first to Huaca Arco Iris, a relatively small pyramid in amongst the city’s suburbs. There we met Tamay the potter, a charming old gentleman, a potter and painter, who creates replicas of the amazing finds from the various archaeological sites in and around Trujillo. His pots are made at his home but he has a little workshop/shop at Huaca Arco Iris, where he paints his pots and chats to the strangers he meets from all over the world. Of course, I bought one of his beautiful pots.

Next to Chan Chan, the largest pre-Hispanic city in South America and made entirely of mud bricks. It originally covered an area of more than 20 square kilometres and may have housed as many as one hundred thousand people. It was built by the Chimu people, the civilisation that followed the Moche, and archaeologists have discovered within its walls all the essentials for city life: workshops and warehouses, plazas and pyramid temples, hearths and homesteads.

Although centuries of wind and rain, and the devastating El niño, have seriously eroded the structures, you can still get a glimpse of the enormity of the metropolis. And, though most of decoration – sculptural reliefs of geometric figures, stylised zoomorphic creatures and mythological beasts – is recreated rather than original, it is still impressive and provides an excellent vision of just how magnificent this city must have been in its heyday. As a Classics major, I am very at home amongst ruins and, at Chan Chan, I could have wandered, content, for hours.

But on we went to our last stop of the day … and it did not disappoint. Coming from land-locked Cusco, another highlight of this grand day was our short visit to the sleepy Pacific resort of Huanchaco, just 20 minutes’ drive from Trujillo. The beach ran for miles and would be perfect for long strolls, but we contented ourselves with a short walk to the end of the very Western-looking pier, where roosting boobies posed obligingly for photos. It was also interesting to watch the clash of ancient and modern in the water, keen surfers sharing the waves with the local fishermen who still use traditional reed boats for fishing.

The water glistened as the sun began to set, setting the scene for more striking photographs, the ideal end to another superb day.

The Bog Blog

A toilet tour of northern Peru ...

Bog number one:

At El Museo de la Nacion in Lima, the biggest chamber I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world – big enough to hold a small party and appropriate enough for the cavernous building in which it was located. I had tried several other toilets but all were locked or out of service, so I asked the security woman where I could find a toilet and she directed me to this ballroom of bathrooms.

Bog number two:

At the Embajador Hotel in Chiclayo. The toilet with a view – or, more accurately, the toilet where you can be viewed! It’s a high-ceilinged room, with perhaps a 20-foot stud – with windows at the top along one wall, which fronts on to a corridor and a small inner courtyard. The windows are permanently open and so high up that they’re impossible for anyone without a tall ladder to close – not something your average tourist carries in their luggage. Presumably they’re open to allow steam and assorted bathroom-specific smells to escape but this also means that anyone feeling even vaguely perverted in the two rooms overlooking the courtyard can also overlook you at your ablutions – not the most comfortable way to complete the daily necessities of life.

Bog number three:

At Huaca de la Luna, near Trujillo. Is this setting beautiful or what?
Huaca de la Luna, and the nearby Huaca del Sol, are archaeological sites of the Moche, or Mochica, civilisation, dating from about 100 to 800 AD, and they are impressive. Huaca de la Luna is an adobe-brick pyramid-shaped structure that appears to have served a religious and ceremonial religious function. It has beautifully coloured sculptural friezes, including one huge wall panel that is seven registers and perhaps 60 feet tall.

I didn’t actually get to use this toilet, as Sarah and I had enjoyed a very thorough tour of the site with our lovely English-speaking guide Henry, so were holding up the Spanish-speaking group and had to rush back to our tour van. The mountain in the background of this image is called Cerro Blanco, or White Mountain.

Bog number four:

At the toy museum, in Trujillo. The toilet was carefully camouflaged with a wallpapered door to match the surrounding wall, the entrance thereby not distracting from the exhibits which surrounded it: to the left, shelves housing dolls, a wooden mototaxi, and an old half-deflated ball; to the right, a pair of colourful, traditionally dressed Peruvian dolls; and, in the foreground, a cabinet displaying a large collection of toy soldiers from France and England dating from 1920 to 1925.

Bog number five:

At the Colonial Hotel in Trujillo, from the first floor balcony where our room was located. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the toilet itself, but it was a nice hotel, with plain but comfortable rooms, and plenty of indoor and outdoor seating areas. It’s only a block and a half from the city plaza, with a nice café next door for breakfast and other meals, and a tour company on the other side, which had friendly staff and reasonably priced and well run tours. Oh, and the toilet was clean too!

Bog number six:

At the Cruz del Sur bus station in Lima. For some unknown and obviously bizarre reason, the cisterns of the toilets were protected by metal grids, padlocked in place. I couldn’t help but speculate as to why: Peru is plagued by toilet thieves? passengers of Cruz del Sur buses have a penchant for fiddling with the inner workings of the cisterns – a fetish with ballcocks perhaps?

This photo was a little tricky to capture. The gloom of the room meant I needed to use the flash and I couldn’t help but wonder what the service staff thought of a bright flash of light suddenly illuminating the end cubicle: had some alien being beamed down from a galaxy far far away? was the kinky gringa taking a photo of some forbidden fruit to instil longing in a distant lover? I avoided making eye contact with the woman on exiting the cubicle and washed my hands with alacrity in order to avoid any difficult questions.