02/10/2012 - 04/10/2012 - A decent pillow in Trujillo

Cama cama cama cama cama chameleon, the bus goes so slow

Marisa explaining the wall sculptures
at the Rainbow temple

A royal model

Before we left Peru we wanted to get a taste of Cama – that is travelling in first class on the bus, and cama literally means bed with the idea being you can get fully horizontal. Not quite the case, when it comes to Linea buses, but with the tiredness from the trekking in the day nothing was going to prevent us getting to sleep! That said, we arrived at Trujillo in darkness (around 5am) bleary eyed, and our situation was not helped when Tripadvisor directed us to a hostel that didn’t exist! Lonely planet proved to be the saviour this time, and cable TV enabled us to be reacquainted with FoxLife!

Cormorants and fishing nets (apparently!)

City of clay

Wooden acting

Doing the Chan Chan

After a morning snooze, we picked ourselves up for a tour round Chan Chan, the Chimu equivalent of Machu Picchu although rather than buildings made out of stone, these predecessors to the Incas were all about the clay. Only saw a small area of the huge (20km²) pre-Columbian adobe city, and whilst not as visually impressive as MP wandering around the ancient palace and seeing the intricate depictions of fish and birds was cool. From there it was a quick stop at the beach side resort of Huanchaco, where the focus was the straw fishing canoes previously favoured by the Chimu (as well as being a popular surfing haunt).

More fishing boat action

Fishing boats at Huanchaco

Police encounters of the cardboard kind at
Trujillo Plaza de Armas

The Moche city with Huaca del Sol in the background

Painted tiles

Took advantage of not needing to get up at a crazy hour the next morning, and tried our luck with using local transport to Huacas del Sol y de la Luna, the capital of the Moche civilisation (which were the predecessors to the Chimu – getting confused yet?!?). Got to emphasise the word tried – after traipsing across the city and getting into a bus for 30 minutes, we were probably about 500m closer to it. Bugger. Cut our losses and jumped in a taxi – time was ticking. Raced round the museum (these dudes were massively into their ceramics), and then somehow persuaded the security to let us wander the ruins at Huaca de la Luna on our own, where we saw the famous painted wall tiles. Missed out on the tour, but it was either that or missing our onward bus – think we made the right choice!

No sign of any moshing...

Peruvian dogs seem to be big
fans of David Beckham!

Key Learnings:

1. The Moche civilisation didn’t invent moshing (at least we don’t think they did!) – they were more interested in human sacrifice…

2. The Colonial hostel in Trujillo is in a dangerous location, in that it’s sandwiched between the best and second best rated restaurants. Again, our travel dieting suffered.