Dusty Oases
The hotel we were staying in had arranged for a driver for the coming days we were to spend here, and he was to meet us at the terminal. Several different buses from different points of origin arrived at the same time, and the terminal was awash with people. We walked in and stood away from the throngs pushing past the luggage carousels in the terminal area to the exit and street beyond. Even after the crowd cleared, we couldn’t see any sign of the driver, and called the hotel. As they were describing the car we should be looking for (which we were now standing in front of) the driver, a tubby man in his early forties, gushed from the terminal offering apologies for having missed us. Seemed we’d walked right past him and not seen the placard he was holding up with my name on it.
If ever there were a person to represent Trujillo, I would say this guy was it. He insisted that Trujillo was the most beautiful city in all of Peru, and had he been pressed on the matter, he’d almost certainly have insisted in the Americas. His car was in far better shape than the one that’d driven us around the RÃo Santa valley—definitely a good start—it even had seat belts and suspension. The flip side was he was a lead foot, and he took us on a lightning tour of the city to show us what a wonderful place it was, but only managed to get us completely disoriented, and feeling a little nauseous.
Trujillo is supposed to be the city of eternal spring, yet the gloom that had greeted us in the morning was still very much in attendance in the mid-morning. Our driver insisted it would clear by lunch time, and that perhaps when he came back to get us in a few hours and start our tours of the area, we would have a sunny day to greet us.
We’d found the hotel online, as well as in the guidebook. The photos and reviews made us think it was probably half decent, and so we’d had a curious exchange of emails with one of the concierges where he used a machine translator, and I used a human one. Despite him receiving emails from us in Spanish, he insisted on changing his answers to English with an online translator. The end result was a garble of second and third person subjectives, as well as some bizarre vocabulary that required further work at our end to decipher. He wasn’t at the front desk when we checked in, though later he proudly introduced himself to us as the one we’d been conversing with.
What DID greet us on our arrival, was the sound of a woman in the foyer toilets vomiting violently every minute. The concierge explained it’d been her birthday the night before, and she’d celebrated a little too much. We got our key and went up to our room. The building was probably from the 1960’s or 1970’s, and had a middle class Las Vegas motel feel about it. When we entered our room, the glass door to the enclosed patio was open and there was a strong smell of mold. The stains that crept across the carpet from the bathroom told us all we needed to know.
It didn’t take long for us to realise we’d need to keep the glass door to the patio open for at least the time we were in the room, so we decided it was best to spend as little time as possible in the room. There was a special deal with visits to the ruins. Taking in the Huacas del Sol y de La Luna (temples of the Sun and Moon), and Chan Chan as the primary destinations got us access to a number of other smaller sites scattered around the city.
As expected, when we emerged from the hotel a few hours later, the driver was waiting for us. His enthusiasm was still stuck on high as he swirled through the narrow streets, duelling with taxis of varying sizes and eventually forcing his way onto a main road heading out of town. We pulled onto a narrow back road that wove through a mixture of decrepit housing, small farm plots, and restaurant campestres, especially built it seems, to capture the tourist dollars that stream in and out of the area each day.
Huacas del Sol y de la Luna stand a short distance apart, at the foot of a pyramid shaped sandy looking mountain; though admittedly, most mountains here are sandy looking. As we arrived, we saw several people walking off across the desert in a spiralling ascent to the summit. Huaca del Sol has yet to be excavated or explored in any way, yet even so, this massive pile of mud bricks is impressive, if not intimidating. Given the incredible discoveries unearthed in Huaca de la Luna, there have got to be some real prizes awaiting. Disappointing though, to see Caucasian tourists scrambling over it, despite the numerous signs around the perimeter expressly asking people not to climb on it because of the erosion it causes.
When we arrived, it was still relatively early in the day, and there was a parade and opening ceremony for the city’s Festival Internacional de la Primavera (Spring Festival) that kept the tourist hordes away. We watched a propaganda video from the organisation funding the excavations, and were then ushered to join an English language tour of the ruins. The Inca may have had a significant impact on Peruvian culture, but they were far from being the only ones. Here, the greatest legacy came from the Moche, and the great piles of adobe bricks they left in the middle of the desert were deceptive disguises for the enormous, and lavishly decorated temples encased within. Alas, no-one will ever see them fully uncovered, due the erosion of the facades this causes; and even if they did uncover them, they’d be a shadow of what they once were. Perhaps the greatest mystery to me though, was the true name for this place in the original Moche language. The names given them are Spanish, and it seems the sands have swallowed their true name.
Groups of locals, including school children were beginning to arrive in numbers as we passed the sacrificial altar. The Moche had a strange custom whereby they’d play a game, of which the end goal was to knock the headdress from one’s opponent before they dislodged yours. If you lost your head gear, you lost your pants, were led away and drugged, then had your blood spilled in a special area between the temple and the pyramidal mountain. It’s said there was considerable honour to be had in losing, and then being sacrificed to the Moche Gods.
When we came down from the ruins, the driver was waiting for us, and he happily whisked us off to the beachside hamlet of Huanchaco for lunch. Clearly, he had a deal with one of the restaurant owners to bring all his passengers to eat here, as when we decided to walk along the promenade and see what else was available, the vendor’s face fell to the sandy street and didn’t seem to pick up again until we returned a short while later on the conclusion we wouldn’t find anything better. I’d had ceviche in Spain, which was pretty good, but was keen to try it in its country of origin. Trujillo is recommended as a place to try the dish and I was pretty eager to give it a burl.
My stomach and bowels had begun to rouse as the gastro stop from a few days earlier dissipated, and I was quickly warned away from anything that may serve to speed said awakening. Deep-fried or well cooked were the only options for me, and I ended up eating something totally unmemorable—fish, I think, though I can’t be sure. Cooked, it was for certain.
After lunch, we were taken to the expansive ruins of Chan Chan. I have to admit, sitting on a couch in Canberra reading my guidebook, I had pictured a site that rose much higher above the ground than it does in reality; I’d also imagined it covered a much smaller area. Much of the ruins are nothing more than that: piles of mud bricks that occasionally rise to form shallow parapets. One of the many palaces that combine to form the complex is still in relatively good condition and has been partly restored, and that’s where all the tours are centred.
A gently mannered man who reminded me of James Earl Jones without the thundering voice offered to take us on a guided tour. He was employed by the local tourism council (or something) but there was the option of paying him a tip at the end of the tour, if we were pleased with the quality of the tour he provided. The air smelled dusty, and I found myself wondering why the Chimú had established a city here (or indeed, why had any of the numerous pre-spanish cultures established along the coastal desert). Fine dust covered everything, whether it had been blown in on a mischievous wind, or was the result of the slow decay of the ruins, it mattered not. It was everywhere.
My background in architecture has to shine through here of course, as the things I marvelled at most were in the structural design. Walls were built like honeycombs to permit air circulation, yet their resemblance to fishing nets still tied them to the common people of the culture. As with the temples of the Inca, the structures built by the Chimú had been built to withstand some significant stresses. The greatest testimony to that was probably in 1970, when the same earthquake that devastated Yungay, flattened the walls that had been rebuilt or restored, yet the original walls that had stood here for centuries, survived intact.
We moved from one large open chamber to the next, each decorated with elaborate sculptures moulded from the dense desert sand, doing our best to avoid the groups of local teenage school children (or at least, I was trying to avoid them) who showed no real interest in the site, and more in each other—and a few of them in me, apparently. When eventually we emerged from the labyrinthine complex, we tipped the guide and walked out to the carpark. The driver had decided to run some errands while waiting for us this time (in the morning, he’d waited for us at the Huacas), but with no method for contacting him, we started to consider the prospect of him having abandoned us for another fare, and the possibility of a long walk back into the city. No sooner had we called the hotel to find out where he was, than he bounced over the horizon and into the carpark, whisking us away in a cloud of dust.
When we got back to the hotel, our concierge with a fondness for machine translation proudly announced himself to us. We got his recommendations for where to eat and walked the few blocks to the local restaurant strip. As with Spain, the smoking laws are less strict than home, and the laughable situation of having smoking and non-smoking sections divided only by a few sickly plants reminded me of a counter lunch I had with my family in a bistro on some journey beyond the Murray in the 1980’s.
As one of the more opulent cities of Perú, Trujillo has at least some of its historical buildings lit for night viewing, reminding me a lot of Spain. Unlike Spain however, the taxis continued to flow like yellow metallic rivers along the one-way streets of the city. We skipped the chaos though, walking back to the hotel in the cool coastal air, so tired that even the moldy hotel room bothered us little as we blacked out.