4. Peru - Heading North and South

the Cathedral to the left, Plaza de Armas, Trujillo

Many of you will know that I am shall we say, careful about my food but here I intend to eat as much Peru-fusion food as I can. Of course this is on the understanding that such ‘fusion’ food includes pizza and pasta. I am however declaring the local delicacy Cuy off-limits but I do hope to see the famous Last Supper in Cuzco Cathedral where the main dish is Cuy. Most of you will not know that we English speakers call Cuy, Guinea Pig.

The most obvious, indeed blindingly obvious result of changing our plan so dramatically away from the Caribbean is that we now have six weeks or so more than we expected in South America. We didn’t have any plan except that we expected to meet up with our friends Bonnie and Newt in mid-January and fly back to the UK in mid March. We now have six weeks extra non-plan to enjoy.

Lima - enclosed window for the
Spanish ladies to watch from

So, here we are in Lima, Peru’s capital. As far I can make out without checking, the only four letter capital of a four letter country in the world. We’ve pitched up in Miraflores, out six miles or so from the old colonial centre in a lively area with plenty of restaurants and street lights. Hotel Casa Cielo is small, immaculate with friendly and helpful staff, breakfast and wi-fi.

First day is usually low key and ours as usual was a walk around the area. We were about half a mile from the sea which has a very British looking pier with very north sea looking grey water when seen from the top of the crumbling earth cliffs. Why is it I wonder that the North Sea is to the east of England ? On the clifftop is a statue of what to most Brits is Peru’s most famous son, Paddington Bear, donated by the British Embassy. The only other Peruvians I know of are Mario Testino the photographer (whose permanent exhibition we visited) and goon Michael Bentine who had a Peruvian father.

Lima is one of the largest cities in South America with a population of nearly ten million. It’s a strange place which despite being in the tropics has fewer sunshine hours than London and very rarely has rain. It has between 1mm and 6mm per annum while London has an average of 583mm and surprisingly to me New York has 1140mm (including snow). That tiny amount of precipitation makes Lima a desert because a desert has less than 250mm per annum. Lima is also different from London in that it has less litter, at least in Miraflores and the Colonial centre. Outlying districts are not so good. Traffic is very heavy and Peruvian drivers don’t drive in a passive aggressive manner, rather they adopt an aggressive aggressive manner with no quarter given or asked for. I suspect that the horns on the cars are the first bits to wear out. They will happily block other vehicles if there is the smallest gap to nudge into and cut across traffic apparently without any regard for other

Lima's Metropolitano,
reserved centre two lanes

road users. Yes, road deaths per 100,000 vehicles are higher than The Dominican Republic at 99.something. Then one of the drivers will stop to let us cross the road, or perhaps it is just to lull us into a false sense of security. Fortunately for us and the commuting public there is now a metro system like the London tube and a Metropolitano which is a rapid transit bendy bus system on dedicated lanes on a main road through the middle of the city. It’s a bit like the Transmilenio in Bogota, he says in a throw-away line. It was a ten minute walk to the station and fifteen minutes later we were in the centre having whizzed past miles of two lanes of near stationary traffic.

a crown of llama

The first big square we came to, the Plaza San Martin has one of those ridiculous stories you couldn’t make up associated with it. A statue was commissioned from Spain of Madre Patria, the symbolic mother of Peru and it was to be topped with a crown of flames. Unfortunately flames in Spanish is llamas and the statue stands there with a crown of a small Llama. That got us off to a jolly start and we were headed for the Presidential Palace to see the Changing of the Guard, clearly a theme for this trip. The square in front of the Palace and the roads leading to it were closed off but we found our way around it all to get ourselves in front of the palace. It turned out there was a demonstration taking place in the city, hence the road closures. The military nonsense of the guard changing was a hoot. The uniforms were bright red trousers with jackboots and white tunics with red epaulettes topped off with gold helmets with a horse tail hanging down the back. Oh, and swords. The band were good but it became just surreal to listen to a military band playing “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail” as featured on Bridge Over Troubled Water (El Condor Paso), while about a hundred guards goose-stepped up and down looking like a camp set of chorus girls. Frankly, it was hilarious and made my day.

a small part of the Changing of the Guard

the luxury coach

We quite enjoyed our time in Lima, even had some sunshine and in an effort to escape the Gringo Trail whose Holy book is Lonely Planet, we headed north to Trujillo. Now, Peru is another whopping great country at about 500,000 square miles (England is about 50,000 square miles). Trujillo was a ten hour coach ride but not on the sort of coach you might imagine. South America really does Comfort on their luxury buses. They are two tier, not as tall as a double decker bus but as long as a full length coach with only three fabulously comfortable seats across. Our bags were checked in just like an airline but less fuss although passports had to be seen and there was a security scan which I set off but

and the luxury, front at the top seats

was waved on the bus anyway. We’d booked the front upstairs for the panoramic views, we had wifi for a while and were very surprised when an airline type meal was delivered to our seats. The trip cost us $26/£18 each and two hours of the ten were spent just getting out of Lima.

With the scant research we do, naturally we always have surprises and we were completely unprepared for the whole 300 mile journey to be through desert. Not a tree or a blade of grass for hour after hour, just windblown sand and rock with regular glimpses of the sea off

those dystopian settlements
on the way north to Trujillo

westward to our left. So, Sahara on Sea. It was spectacularly beautiful in an austere and wild way. Every shade of rusty red and tan and brown you could imagine. A martian would feel at home here although she’d probably find the air a little thick. Before we got to the wide open spaces we did drive for some time through a dystopian landscape where the sandy ground was covered with shacks, and I mean hundreds of shacks. Towns of apparently nothing, unrelieved shacks, no green, no variation. Further out from Lima there were some areas, still just sand with plots of perhaps half an acre with a hut sat on it. These were not lived in but were staked out when the government offered free land, free of taxes for twenty years as part of the calming down after The Shining Path terrorist attacks in the late twentieth century.

Trujillo was poorly lit and we got off at the bus station at about 10.30pm with no idea where we were but with a taxi ordered by our hotel. No taxi, so we had to sort our own out. We knew the price we were quoted of 15 Soles would be outrageously high for a local but that is only $5/£4 and he took us straight to the hotel about twenty minutes away. We were in the Hotel Due, having decided not to stay in the Hotel Wanka. I jest not.

fruit seller in Trujillo

We had come this far to see pre-Inca civilisation ruins. It’s often thought that the only civilisation in this area was Inca but there were many different cultures here over thousands of years. Inca were only from about 1100ad to the Spanish arrival around 1520ad. Indeed the height of the Inca empire lasted little more than thirty or forty years.

Near to Trujillo were the remains of the Moche culture (about 100ad to 700ad) at The Temples of the Sun and Moon and the Chimu culture (about 900ad to 1470ad) at Chan Chan. It was actually bone dry stuff being in the desert and still mostly covered in sand but in fact it was all fascinating. The Moche Temple of the Sun, made of mud bricks, had been badly damaged by storms caused by El Nino, the periodic warm current off the coast which disturbs the weather pattern greatly. The Temple of the Moon, also mud brick, had undergone excavation and was

decorated wall in Huaca de la Luna (about 15 feet wide)

the outermost temple wall

extensively decorated and impressively huge. Every now and again the Moche would rebuild the temple over the previous one and there were five temples one inside the other, much like those Russian Dolls. Families would contribute numbers of bricks with a family mark on each one to be used in the rebuilding. One family mark which made the whole thing seem almost like a connection over 1500 years was the smiley face family (see photo). However, being made of crumbly mud bricks well over a thousand years old, an inner temple could only be examined by destroying an outer temple layer so a real headache for archaeologists. The Moche Gods had to be placated with human sacrifices chosen by hand to hand combat. The losers were tied up, led away and executed some time later. No evidence of priests being sacrificed have been found. Funny that. It appears that exceptional wet weather over a number of years (corroborated by arctic ice core investigations) ultimately destroyed a civilisation whose religion promised stable weather and the people then found a new ideology to cling to.

one temple's wall behind another

the smiley face family tile

The Chimu were based at Chan Chan, a city which covered twenty square kilometres and is believed to have been the largest adobe city the world has ever seen. The main palace was ringed with what looked like a mediaeval town wall but up to thirty feet high and again made of mud bricks with a smooth mud finish, rather like Milton Abbas. Here the King was also the God and dressed in

Chan Chan, the remains of the outer wall
of the palace with a Turkey Vulture for scale

gold to impress at ceremonial occasions, he received taxes imposed on the workers in the form of produce. This was kept in an immense area inside the palace which had a form of cooling system with air channelled from one store to another. This civilisation was based on agriculture and the rich fishing off the coast. The precise end date of 1470 I mentioned above is known because that was when the Chimu were defeated by the Inca and their civilisation was destroyed.