Chiclayo Hotels
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Into Egypt
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We are finally in Peru. The one country in South America I most wanted to visit, but also the only country that I expected to disappoint me. Opinions from other travellers and warnings in the guidebook prepared us for a country filled with pushy salesman and strangle robbers. And so we were disappointed.
It started at four in the morning on the border. We let our Ecuadorian visa expire. We were only 5 hours late and it was entirely our own stupidity, but we had to pay a $400 fine to leave the country with an exit stamp. So we opted for the option without the exit stamp (never to return on the same passport). Next come Peruvian immigration where we had to ´buy a special visa´ to make up for the lack of an exit stamp.
Having bought our entry into the country we finally arrived in the noisy, and after 12 hours on a night bus, slightly overwhelming city of Chiclayo. From there it got only worse. We were tired from the bus, I developed a runny tummy and the supermarket wouldn't accept our money because it was false. For three days we both thought that Peru is the worst country in world, but then it started to get better. I was healthy and rested, we knew how to recognise false money and slowly we started to like the country. And the longer we travel in Peru the more we like it, we might even be falling in love. Like I said, Chiclayo is a noisy city and we stayed right next to what the guidebook calls ´the liveliest market in Peru´ so it was extra noisy. Almost anything is available in the market: huge blue barrels each filled with a different type of olive, fruit and vegetables, slaughtered guinea pigs, ducks and chickens, a thousand different herbs used for cooking, medicine and witchcraft and, of course, Chinese clothing, Chinese shoes and Chinese sweets. Naturally with such fierce competition advertising is important and even the fruit sellers have a microphone and speakers with which to advertise their produce.
Our reason for staying in Chiclayo was 2 important archaeological sites in the desert surrounding the city. The first site was Tucume. A city build be the Lambayeque people a thousand years ago. Because it is situated in the desert the building material most readily available is of course sand, therefore the whole site, which includes 26 pyramids, is built from adobe (clay) bricks. The largest adobe structure in the world is found here, a huaca (platform pyramid) 700m long, 280m wide and 30m high and this is pretty big if you know that almost the whole structure is solid. Unfortunately, because everything is built from unbaked bricks, much of it has been destroyed by rain and wind. Only from the top of a nearby hill are the structures recognizable as anything but weathered heaps of sand. This site was impressive but slightly confusing because there was not enough information available to make much sense of the weathered structures.
The second site was Sipan, much more interesting and impressive than Tucume. The two sites look very similar, which means that both look more like a building site than an archaeological site. The difference is that at Sipan the have found undisturbed graves filled with treasures. Before we went to Sipan we first visited the museum in Lambayeque where all the artefacts found are housed. Sipan is a Moche site and consists of three pyramids. In one of these pyramids graves have been found, the most spectacular being that of a warrior-priest known as The Lord of Sipan. He was buried dressed in his ceremonial clothes, which consisted of a lot of gold, silver and copper objects. With him was buried a wife, two guards, a llama and a dog. Moche pottery is famous because it depicts the Moche life in such detail, from the food eaten to explicit sexual acts. Many pots also depict extravagantly dressed priest performing religious ceremonies. It was only when the graves at Sipan were found that Archaeologists had prove that the costumes depicted on the pottery was really worn by priests. Sipan was a fabulous site with a lot of interesting information and reconstructions of the tombs.
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