The Temple of the Moon
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2008
1
8
20
Trip End
Dec 06, 2008
Chiclayo,
Peru
Friday, October 24, 2008
Friday morning and Lambada regular as clock work. It gave me a chuckle as I prepared to tackle the precision task of getting the water in the shower somewhere between skin-meltingly hot and too cold to breath.
When I came out Ewa was in tears and Wojtek sitting there like nothing happened. I knew it was coming since our unentertaining day at the museum.
Wojtek wanted to go to the beach, me and Ewa, Sipan.
Brothers and sisters, it happens.
Wojtek was right on one hand, it´s everyone holiday so why should we just do what we want? It took a little bit of a tense atmousphere and a little diplomacy from the independent (me). Be we agreed happily to go to Sipan and I´d take Wojtek drinking when we got to Cajamarca the next day.
We trundled off to a different mini bus station that's not quite on the map in the LP guide and found it with no troubles.
We found it and we found a slightly bigger bus than yesterday's trip to Lambayeque, and set off into the scorching desert in search of one of the most important archeological finds in the last 20 years. A lot of the tombs haven't even been opened yet, due to lack of funding, but the work is due to begin in the next six months.
All this information here is thanks to a part time guide and new friend Miguel, who took us on an amazing tour of the latest discoveries and even letting us get within touching distance of some of the pieces found as they were being restored by a friend of his. Most notable a small green copper owl statuette and a ghastly green mask that formed part of the first lord of Sipan´s necklace.
Miguel explained how the new lord of Sipan wore gold on one side to represent the sun and silver on the other to represent the moon, and genuinely filled in all the gaps that the trip to the museum had left in the story.
I use the word genuinely with purpose because Miguel is genuinely one of the nicest people I´ve met.
He explained how the king never walked anywhere and that how the weight of precious metals he wore caused him great arthritis, and about how grave robbers drilling into the ground, had missed the lord of Sipans by inches.
If they had drilled a little to the left many of the artifacts in the museum would have been lost to the black market, maybe smelted down, and lost forever.
He told us about the ´waaka´ the spirit of the area, and that like with the Egyptian pyramids, some of the robbers that had ransack lesser tombs here, had met an untimely death because of the poisonous gas given off by the corroded copper in the treasures.
1 - 0 for the Waaka:)
After the tour we caught the bus back to Chiclayo with Miguel, who was on his way to an English class, Miguel gave Wojtek a lesson in chatting up Chikitas in Spanish and arranged to meet up later for drinks and in particular two local cocktails made from the fruit of a local tree.
We, shamelessly to say, had a Pizza in a nice restaurant, something ´roma´, and met Miguel after his class and went for an Algorrabina (like a White Russian but nicer) and a Pisco Sour (a sharp tasting, sweet cocktail). Both made with honey, distilled from the fruit of a local tree and both Alcoholicious...
