The greatest kept secret in Peru.. Amazing ruins
Trip Start
Jan 12, 2008
1
33
41
Trip End
Jan 15, 2009
Chachapoyas,
Peru
Friday, June 20, 2008
We are now well in Peru after a number of gruelingly painful and long bus journeys... Summary for thou...
Loja (Ecuador) to Piura - a nothing town where we stayed for a few nights in an attempt to delay the inevitable, dreading the thought of our next long bus journey... In fact, our next bus journey was very pleasant from Piura to Chiclayo and was along the Pan Americana highway, on the coast, which means it has no Andean mountain ranges towering out of the Earth anywhere which makes the trip ten times shorter! So our 3 hour trip to Chiclayo (where we stayed for one night) was surprisingly short and raised our spirits before we jumped on a simi cama (semi bed) bus to Chacapoyas..
Now this is the silly thing over here.. They have all these private bus companies right..
Now - one, they donīt make it easy here in Peru by having a bus terminal where all the buses leave from like Colombia and Ecuador, but rather have their own "terminals" for each individual bus company which are spread up and down a couple of streets or, in some cases, around the whole town..
01 The Chacapoyas locals
. This make it very fun for us - Lucky things! We now have to walk around from bus company to bus company trying to figure out who is going where and at what time and for what price and what is the bus like (big variances - from really nice to really, well the opposite) etc. Good times. Secondly.. As the case seems so far, each bus company usually has 2 options to get to the places that we have been trying to get to, granted - they Arenīt exactly the country capitals - in fact they have been quite out of the way, but they have one economico (economic / cheap) option and one simi-cama / cama option which leave 15 or 30 minutes after each other. Now, one would naturally assume that given the amount of competition, the next bus company will have different options for times, but you would be wrong! They all seem to leave at the same time from company to company and at really "odd-folk" times. Our bus to Chacapoyas was around 10 and a half hours and between the 4 or 5 companies that provided the option for the town, they all left with in half an hour of each other between 6:30 and 7:00pm which means that you arrive in Chacapoyas at 5:30, (if you take the latest bus possible) to join the patrons of the other buses in a tired, dazed and dark walk around town in search of a place to sleep.
Sorry, got carried away with the summary bit... Turned out to be a bit more of an elaborate summary than I was going for...
Anyho.. We Went to Chacapoyas, not for the town, but for the barely visited ruins of Kuelap which lie nearby..
02 Mad rock formation
. The town itself was pleasant and quiet with not a sight of tourists.The Kuelap ruins are set on a magnificent mountain ridge at an altitude of 3100m, once a cloud forest. The ruins were built by a pre-Colombian civilization known as the Chacapoyas people. The ruins that remain now is a platform, approximately 600m long by 100m wide which stands about 8 - 10 metres high off the top of the mountains ridge. From the outside of the ruins, it looks like a long wall with a few entries. Once on top of the main platform, You can see another 3 platforms high which sit on top of each other and many circular brick house ruins. The platform has 6 entries which narrowly pierce the wall and climb paths which get thinner and thinner (to around 60cm) as you get to the platform level - built like this to help fight against intruders - The Incas in particular.
Archaeologists believe people were living here as early as 400 AD. A Peruvian man who re-discovered it in the last 200 years some time found a mummy in a tomb. Not just any old mummy though the person buried here had blonde hair and blue eyes.
This civilization despite appearing uninvadable, was conquered by the INCAS in the 1400īs. This fact is evident in the buildings. The pre-Colombian people had circular houses with a peaked top made of grasses. Post Inca invasion the building bore the classic Inca look of angled walls (squares, rectangles, etc). And hows this - The Chacapoyas people bury their dead in tombs under the floor of their house in a small hole and continue living on top - You could see one of these holes in almost every house.
03 On the way (where we had lunch) to Kuelap
. Many of the bones however, have been taken by thieves. At this time the people were buried in the fetal position, to represent coming to life from mother earth and returning the same way as they came.We did the tour guide thing this time round because it turned out that we werenīt going to make a big saving by doing it ourselves and we both really wanted the English guide because that is some Spanish vocabulary that is beyond us. So it was just the four of us including the driver who stayed in the car and after we had been driving to these ruins for an hour, we saw our first glimpse from them across a great big Andean valley... Another 2 hours later, we arrived! Yeap - 2 hours after seeing the ruins! Flamin Andes - Nah, we actually love the andes! It is not hard to do a journey through the Andes because the views are so spectacular. When we arrived there.. It was just the three of us (Me, Katie and the guide), a few local Peruvians, a bunch (yes, not a school, not a pack, or a heard, a bunch) of Lamas! (Yeow! Our first Peruvian Lamas) and the National geographic team who were doing an article on the place (about 6 of them). We were in such awe of these ruins that it seemed unimaginable that they are so unknown and that so few visit them. Apparently, only 1% of the tourist crowd that come to Peru visit Northern Peru because it is difficult to get around and to get there, and of that 1%, only a tiny fraction take the time out to visit these ruins... There has been talks about putting a cable car to the ruin site making it much more highly accessible but there is some bad feelings about this from the local people who think it will ruin the site and surrounding views.
After the amazing ruins we left for Trujillo (on the coast) on a night bus - Shocking night bus with flamin Movil who played the music all night long! They have no drivers compartment door either so we were stuck listening to the flirtatious bus attendant lady and the driver chat all night - Loudly! Man alive... And the air con... Well it was a bad trip anyway. Trujillo - Not a great place to go for the beaches because if you stray less than 1km in either direction - "Muchos ladrones (Many thieves)" and there has been plenty of brutal muggings we found out. We stayed in the town, which was very nice, for a few nights (We have actually forgotten how long - hahaha - Thats terrible! Itīll come back to me) and then caught yet another night bus to Huaraz - Great trip with linea! Our best bus ride yet - Thank God!. They even took our finger prints as we entered through security checks before hoping on the bus.. We felt very safe!
Thats all about that.. Joe from Huaraz!
