Death by Chicken - Chiclayo
Trip Start
Nov 03, 2004
1
47
165
Trip End
Nov 23, 2006
Chiclayo,
Peru
Thursday, July 28, 2005
"That flight is a charter."
"We have a reservation and have been issued tickets for the 8:30
flight".
"That flight is a charter. Your flight is at 11:30."
"No. We have a 12:30 flight to catch from San Cristobal.
We specifically bought tickets for the flight leaving now. It's a 45
minute flight
Everyone wants their photo taken
. We will miss our connection.""The 8:30 flight is a charter. You cannot be on it. Sorry." [Which
actually translates as I didn't sell you the ticket, it's not my
problem, I'm leaving now back to the office but won't be telling you
that, don't think I'll be calling Tans to tell them you will be
connecting but might be delayed, oh, and I'll be making sure that
everyone with a ticket for the 11:30 flight is on the plane before
you are so you might miss out on that flight too (it's a 10 seater
plane), have a nice day].
Come 11:30 there was no sign of an air taxi and we were reconciled to
being stuck in San Cristobal for two or three days until we could get
another seat on Tans. By 11:40 we were jammed into the tiny plane
and on our way
I think it suits me
. When we finally arrived in San Cristobel, for somereason (not explained by our luck or any assistance from the air taxi
company) the Tans flight was delayed and still on the tarmac. I had
a stand up with the check-in guy who processed fellow air taxi
passengers (while we were standing at the counter) in front of us.
They were being walked-through by air taxi staff because they might
miss their flight (that would be our flight too). Then Security
searched my bag and confiscated the nail scissors (which I'd stupidly
forgotten to transfer to the other pack), but I managed to convince
them that I had a medical condition that allowed me to take
hypodermic needles and scalpel blades onto the plane in my hand
luggage! By the time some officious runway official had told us
to, "Hurry up. You're the last people on the plane", we'd had about
enough of the non-fauna experiences of the Galapagos.
We arrived in Guayquil only slightly frazzled and immediately took
the bus to Cuenca (Kwen-ka)
King Kongs
. Michelle (from the boat) had told us itwas her favourite city in Ecuador - still trying to work out why. We
arrived at 8:00pm to discover they were throwing the International
Health Symposium II with 1500 delegates and no there wasn't a bed
here or "... anywhere else I can think of". David walked around until
he found us the last bed in town at 9:00pm.
Cuenca is a nice enough colonial town with a pretty Plaza de Armas
into which they pipe classical piano music. They have an
extraordinary 'new' cathedral (built in 1883) which suffers no gilt at
all but massive raw stone Norman columns, arches and fantastic,
luminous, modern stain glass. The Banco Central sponsors an
excellent museum (slightly behind the site of Tomebamba and not on it
as the guidebook suggests) featuring displays of all the Inca and
Caņari remains found at the site. It also has an ethnographic floor
featuring funky black lit dioramas, all sorts of cool handicrafts and
Amazonian shrunken heads (traditionally a consequence of their
judicial system)
Some student restrung this
.We used Cuenca to catch up on diary, sleep and visit Ingapirca
(Ecuador's most important Inca ruin) situated on the Royal Road
between Qusqo and Quito. It was a nice day outing although the town
had obviously been just a staging post and was not very large. It
was mostly reconstructed, but there were llamas and the only
elliptical Temple of the Sun in the Inca Empire.
We had left unfinished business in Peru (having had to leave early to
catch a boat) so after a few days of Chinese food we headed for
Tumbes again. We caught a bus to Huaquillas on the Ecuadorian
border - along the coast road through a landscape of (surprising)
rice paddies and, obviously, banana plantations. Everyone waited
while we stopped outside town for the gringos to get their passports
stamped and then we arrived to descend into the usual chaos of
shouting, shoving taxi drivers, hotel and collectivo touts
Still alive in Ingapirca
. We hadadopted an English couple who hadn't done this border crossing
before. With them we crossed the land bridge between Ecuador and
Peru (together with all the locals trooping backwards and forwards
with boxes of duty free toilet paper and stereos) trailing various
unsuccessful collectivo touts and money changers bombarding us with
competing offers for fares and exchange rates. 14km later, after a
slight altercation with collectivo driver over the agreed fare versus
the requested fare (he won - we were actually arguing about NZD2.50),
another passport stamp, a discourse by the taxi driver on why the
Argentines should never have started the Falklands war, we were back
at the Roma Hotel as if we'd never left.
The next morning we took the seven hour hell bus trip to Chiclayo -
no leg room (and that was before everyone reclined their seat), no
opening window for us, everyone else seemed to think that 38oC was
cold and was wrapping up not opening the windows, no bathroom stop.
From Chiclayo we are going to fly out to Iquitos on the banks of the
Amazon proper. But, of course, when we arrived we discovered that
they don't fly from here anymore and the closest departure point is
seventeen hours away in Lima.
So, the other thing to see in Chiclayo is the biggest "witch
doctor's" market in Peru. Mostly this stuff is what we would call
traditional, herbal medicine. There are stalls selling the sort of
packaged products, bottles and jars you would see in any Chinese
herbalist and heaps and bundles of fresh and dried herbs, plants and
plenty of aloe. But there are also maracas (different designs for
the spirits you need exorcised), dried llama foetuses for fertility,
anaconda and boa skins (powdered or whole), various amulets made from
bones and seeds and a brown capuchin monkey who can pick your fortune
out of a box. You can buy good fortune figurines; vials filled with
a combination (depending on need) of seeds, insects, fruit, paper
money, small snakes, nuts and bolts, bits and bobs; bespoke potions
and lotions.
Around the witch doctor market has grown up a regular market where
you can buy things you wouldn't even try looking for in New Zealand.
There are stalls fixing $10 watches or just selling gas igniters. I
found a stall selling needle plates for sewing machines (my sewing
machine is nearly 30 years old and I've never needed to replace the
needle plate). You get to needle plates through fruit, past socks,
undies and pirated DVDs, turn right by costumes and batteries, run
straight through veges, watchs and serviettes, hang a left by
toothpaste and blender blades and carry on to cobblers and super
glue - if you get to tripe and evening bags you've gone too far. I
poked around for hours (and have been back several times and can't
consistently return to anything - except the crocodile skull) and, in
the meantime, I was the most fascinating thing that had happened in
the market in months. I don't think they see many tourists in
Chiclayo and everywhere I went people wanted to know where I came
from, what we spoke there (it was quite obviously not Spanish), what
we eat, did I like Peru, where had I been in Peru, where were my
children, would I take their picture. It was a very welcoming place.
On Saturday David found me at the internet cafe and casually
slipped, "How do you feel about going to the States tomorrow?", into
the conversation. There was a shuttle launch scheduled for Tuesday
and we've been a bit slack about checking that website recently.
Remembering "flexibility", we spent the rest of the day trying to get
ourselves to the Cape. In the end it was going to cost a bomb and
involve 48 hours solid travelling and, given that this launch has
been postponed several times and so was hardly a guaranteed deal, we
decided to rearrange things later in the trip to make the 9 September
launch. Of course, Discovery did launch successfully, but, because
it lost heat sheilding and thermal tiles on launch, NASA have now
cancelled the rest of the launch schedule until they can investigate
why the one thing they've been working on for the last 18 months went
wrong!
So, not having flown to Iquitos (because we can't) or Miami (because
we're idiots) we have a few days to kill in Chiclayo. Around and
about there are some important ruins. Oh well, it's been a while
since we've done any proper ruins so we settled in for a run on
wrecked stuff.
Generally, we find it better to visit the museum before the site to
give you some context on the holes in the ground. So, first stop
Lambuyeque where the Royal Tombs of Sipan museum and the Bruning
museum reside. Sipan is possibly the most important archaeological
find in Peru. It probably started out as a "where can we take the
students this summer for a dig" expedition and became the sort of
find that makes a career (both from being there when it was uncovered
and from investing the rest of your working life in analysing the
finds). Three main tombs have been found unraided. They include
the "Lord of Sipan" (who died at about 40 - it's believed from
something he picked up drinking the blood of sacrificed prisoners of
war), the "Old Man of Sipan" (the Lord's great uncle who died at
about 70 - he'd probably been living on mashed potato for the last 35 years
since he had no teeth and 40 was considered quite old) and
the "Priest of Sipan".
Each tomb is contained in a different level of a mudbrick pyramid. All the
tombs contained various sacrifices: wives, concubines, llamas,
military advisers, children, dogs (to guide the spirits to the
afterlife), guards (who had their feet cut off so they couldn't leave
their posts), servants and "watchers". Also, and this is the good
bit, more loot than Tutankamen. The Lord of Sipan had so much in his
coffin he was forced to lie on stuff - including his crown. Fully
dressed for his burial he was wearing about 100lbs of worked gold.
The tombs contained the usual ceramic offerings containing food and
drink for the journey. Moche (circa AD 1-750) ceramic is considered
the finest in pre-Columbian America and these grave goods were
certainly the most detailed, realistic and imaginative ceramics we've
seen in any museum. (Unfortunately, because of the quantity of gold
held in the museum you are not allowed to take photos at all and the
postcards really sucked). Each body was wearing a number of
magnificiant collars made from thousands of tiny shell beads (which
some poor student had to meticulously sort and restring). The Old
Man's collar had solid gold octopus tentacles attached (I quite liked
that one) and the Priest was wearing a tunic of gold disk scale mail.
The museum is constructed as a pyramid and the visitor descends from
the top floor through three levels discovering the finds in the same
sequence that the archaeologists did. There is so much from this
site that the museum puts you in complete overload. By the end
instead of being fantastic, exciting and a window into ancient way of
life and alien belief system - the way the find must have looked to
those students before they started having to sweep everything with a
toothbrush - everything is looking like you've seen it before.
The following day, at the holes were the tombs were before they were
emptied, we saw reconstructions of the grave arrangements for the
Lord and the Priest as they were on the day of their burial. The Old
Man is shown as he was found - a skeleton covered in a mound of
corroded metal, each layer requiring painstaking removal, analysis,
cleaning, sorting, restoration and reconstruction.
Each level of the pyramid was constructed from adobe bricks. The
families of the community (or perhaps only the important families)
each contributed a number of bricks for the construction. Each of
those bricks is marked by the family's symbol (and some poor student
is cataloguing those too). The pyramid that has been excavated rises
about 20m - all constructed from 40cm high bricks. The other two
pyramids (unexcavated but thought to contain another 15 tombs) rise
45m and 60m -they look like heavily eroded hills which you are
allowed to scramble to the top of, scraping your hands and knees on
bits of stone and ceramic contained in the decaying adobe. Time,
money and technology allowing excavation of these tombs will begin in
the next five years.
Today is independence day and we have stayed in Chiclayo for the
obligatory parades. Peruvians we have noticed are quite big on
parades. Inexplicably, however, they threw the parade yesterday
(while we were at Sipan) and today, a public holiday, everyone is out
on the streets shopping for pirated DVDs, nail clippers, Barbie
jandals and rotisseried chicken or trying to sell a shoe shine, rip-
off Rip Curl caps, batteries or cellphone cases.
It has not been a good month for good, remember to bring home, foodie
ideas, but here are some "experiences":
(In Ecuador) an 'included in hotel tariff' breakfast was two slices of
white bread, microwaved, and buttered with half a slice
of cheese slapped in between.
(In northern Peru where the cuisine is somewhate "less" than southern
Peru) plates of multi-coloured marshmellow onto which have been stuck
ice cream cones like sand castle turrets - buy a cone and you get as
much marshmallow as sticks to the cone included;
Fresh made (from local cocoa) chocolate spread out and set on leaves -
you buy by the banana leaf;
I know that the Vintners' Brunch has just passed and the Food Show is
coming up but we have just attended the 2nd International Festival of
King Kongs in Lambuyeque! A King Kong is a 6" diameter biscuit
(cross between round wine and flaky pastry) onto which is layered an
inch of pineapple jam, 3 inches of caramelised condensed milk studded
with caramelised figs and an inch of fig pulp before being topped by
another biscuit. You eat it sliced!
The only restaurants that exist in Chiclayo (city of 200,000) serve
rotisseried chicken and chips.
Both well, have seen enough chicken parts and 6" diameter heart
attacks to last a lifetime, we're heading back to Ecuador tomorrow,
