Last stop: Trujillo!

We came to Trujillo on "Cruz del Sur!" "El placer en viajar en bus!" I think that means, The pleasure of travelling by bus! We had the pleasure of travelling by bus for 2 days! Now, to the casual observer, noticing that Cruz del Sur has reclining seats, pillows, and blankets, you'd think I could sleep well. WRONG! 3 reasons why.

1. there are movies playing 24/7.

2. there are horrible movies playing 24/7.

3.there are movies so fantasticly horrible playing people think they are going to die if they are not rescued immediately 24/7.

Finally we got there, took a taxi to our hotel, and did the coolest thing ever. WE...slept. We got in our bedclothes, ran to the beds, and slept. When we woke up the next morning, we ate breakfast and then took a tour with the owner of the hotel, Senora Clara. She took us to Tucume, and then we went to the El Museo Tumbes Reales de Sipan, where they have all the magnificent treasures from the grave of the Lord of Sipan.

First, Tucume is a complex of 26 pyramids inhabited by the Lambayeque culture, then the Chimu, then the Inca starting about 1200 years ago. The pyramids don't look very much like pyramids any more because they have been eroded over time by the heavy rains that come with a really bad El Nino year. They look like giant mounds of mud. You can see the bricks in some places which are shaped like loaves of bread. That shape leaves a little room for the bricks to wiggle when there is an earthquake. These pre-Columbians apparently were more sensitive to nature's power than we are. Their building are still standing while our buildings crumble into rubble when there is an earthquake.

Then we went to the museum where they keep the Lord of Sipan. Our guide and innkeeper told us that a king would have had two earrings but the Lord of Sipan had 3 which must have meant that he was really important. http://www.delange.org/LordSipanGold/LordSipanGold.htm If you go to this site you can see some of the treasure he was buried with. In addition to being buried with lots of stuff, he was buried with 8 people and 3 animals. The people included a watchman, a guard with his feet cut off so he couldn't leave his post, his wife, two maids, a little boy, and two soldiers. There were also 2 llamas one old and one young, and a dog. He was buried with a thousand little pots in human form. These little pots served to hold offerings of corn and other foods. Each face was individual, some were crying. He had several pectorals made of thousands of tiny shell beads in fantastic designs. On all the things with the king on it had the same clothes, decorations, and attributes as the real king, down to the smallest detail, like his amazing owl head garland made of gold. On the little statues, there were turquoise beads made out of microscopic shavings, and there were at least 2,000,000 beads in all!

Yesterday we started out at Chan Chan. It's the largest adobe city in the world and the largest city in pre-Columbian America. At the entrance gate what did we find but a native hairless Peruvian dog. They are not hairless because of some disease, that's just how they are. They have a higher body temperature than other dogs. When you pet them they feel hot. Like Tucume, Chan Chan had many pyramids most of which have been eroded. The people who built this place had domesticated pelicans that they used to catch fish just like the Chinese used cormorants. There were wall carvings showing the pelicans with fish in their mouths. I learned that the people of Chan Chan were great at using the ocean's resources to get food. Many of the walls had rhomboid or square designs representing the nets they used to catch crabs and fish. There were also fish, pelican, duck, and wave designs. There were several large vultures flying overhead.

Next we went to Huaca del Arco Iris, the Temple of the Rainbow. On the wals there you could see in a few places the remains of the yellow paint they painted with. When we see most runis today they are stone or sand colored but when they were in use they would have been brightly painted. When we climbed to the top of the temple on a steep ramp we had a marvelous view of the city and the mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the distance.

Our last stop for the day was the Huaca del Sol and the Huaca de la Luna, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon. These two pyramids were the center of the Moche culture almost 2000 years ago. Our guide, Senora Clara, took us around the Temple of the Moon, which was the most colorful building we had seen. Here a lot of the paint on the carvings has been preserved and they are still brightly colored. There were long walls with faces, fish, dragons, snakes, men, and jaguars. One wall was like an "I spy" page of jumbled images. Another interesting thing we saw there was a collection of bricks from the excavation. Each brick had a different mark on it. The scientists have discovered 85 different marks. They think it is to identify the different families or clans that contributed to the construction. While our guide was explaining it to us people kept getting confused and lost and had no idea where to look. We could not go into the Temple of the Sun because it is not excavated yet. So we just looked at it from the outside.

On our way back to the inn Sra. Clara stopped at the house of a friend who makes traditional ceramics and plays traditional music. He had one of the hairless Peruvian dogs. That is where I got to pet one. He and his brothers also played us some songs and Sra. Clara made me dance which I didn't plan on doing. Eventually, my mom and a couple other people from our group got pulled in too and I didn't feel so embarassed after that.