Casa Vieja Chachapoyas

There is nothing much to recommend Pedro Ruiz but I had a good nights sleep after a long travel day and was looking forward to heading to Chachapoyas - again by collectivo. The road there is now paved so it was an easy ride and we arrived at about 11. We found Hotel Casa Vieja and settled in. Chachapoyas was the third town settled by the Spaniards in Peru. It used to be a major crossroads but these days is a pretty laid back town of 20,000 in the middle of an amazing range of mountains. My ma...

Kuelap was one of the main sites I wanted to visit in Peru and today...I'm going! We booked a tour with a company that was recommended by someone in Iquitos. We left at 8:30 and it would be a 3 hour drive. I think it's only about 60 Km from Chachas but you have to understand the condition of the roads here. And, to make things even more exciting, it was raining when we woke up. Oh boy. The first part is paved...easy peasy. Then it's gravel with an occasional creek crossing...and then the road...

Today we visited the ancient Chachapoyan fortress home called Kuelap. This walled city was built about a thousand years before the Inkas took over the entire country and is referred to as the largest edifice of stone in the Americas. The fortress sits on top of a beautiful mountain in a circle of beautiful mountains. Theories about whether the fortress was truly a fortress in a military sense are still evolving. For the most part, the fortress encircled and protected a large population of Cha...

We took another long mountain drive today to the mountain burial site known as Karajia. These burials consist of mummies encased in containers that look somewhat like those babushka wooden doll things from Russia. You know, the ones where smaller ones are encased in smaller ones until the really tiny one is found in the center. Anyway, these burial enclosures are up on a cliff ledge some 100 feet above the precipitous mountain ridge you stand on to view them. There are about six and a half of...

Well, okay,so the trip by car from Cajamarca to Chachapoyas was so fantastic,we´ve decided to do it all over again... Actually,some indigenous natives from the jungle area near here, in the Amazonas district,decided they wanted to take over a bridge at a little pueblo called Corral Quemada (Burnt Corral). They also took this bridge over a few months ago and the take-over lasted many days. So, the prognosis is this blockade will last quite some time. We got to the bridge about five minutes aft...