Northern Coast of Peru

Besides our first baby-steps in volunteering in Trujillo, we had some free time to discover the wonders in the neighborhood. We began with a half our ride in a local “collectivo”, which is either a regular car or a minibus picking up passengers on a hypothetically pre-defined route. Though we never had the chance to figure out what the route is... The funny thing about these public transpot vehicles, that the number of people inside them and the speed they are cruising about is unlimited. Once there were 4 of us sitting in a regular car in the front seats and 5 in the rear :)

But coming back to our cultural discoveries, Chan Chan is a is the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas and the biggest adobe city in the world. Built in AD 1300 by the Chimu, it hosted an estimated 60 thousand inhabitants as the capital of the larger empire, until they were conquered by the Incas in 1471. The site would have been beyond comprehension without an English speaking guide, who explained us the functions of the different parts of the remaining citadel, which indeed had very distinguished symbolism and functionality. Unfortunately what we can see today is a fraction of the original leaving your imagination alone with the one and only mud color your eye can detect, melting the enormous structure into the equally mud colored scenery. But it is truly captivating, maybe because of its brutal simplicity.

Our next destinantion was the ceremonial and administrative centers of the Moche empire: Huaca de la Luna, the Temple of the Moon, which is 700 years older than Chan Chan. Actually the real attraction would be opposite, the Huaca del Sol, the Temple of the Sun, if it was not closed for visitors. It is still the largest single pre-Columbian structure in Peru, though one third has been washed away during the last one and a half millennia. It was built with an estimated 140 million adobe bricks, prepared and donated by the Moche people. Many of the bricks wear the unique sign of each household or worker who prepared them. The Huaca de la Luna, a good 500m across the desert is a pile of five temples built on top of each other, each new one completely covering the previous one.

We have also visited a sea resort of sorts – Huanchaco – some 20 minutes by bus from Trujillo. It is a great place to relax though the beach is not exactly the nicest we have seen. The good thing about the place is that you can learn how to surf for almost next to nothing. Of course if you do not mind the cold Pacific Ocean. It would have been our next challenge…

We have also had the pleasure to witness the start of another project related to Bruce Peru – WindAid. Basically a wind power generator to be deployed on rental basis in areas where there is no electricity. We have seen it work next to the coast but it really does not need much wind…Since basically you can find generic manuals how to build one on the internet my next challenge once we stop our nomadic life will be building one for myself…Anyway a very inspiring project which I hope will fly big time.

More or less our exploration of the north of Peru ended there. We were proposed to take over the lead of a Bruce Peru center in Cusco. We still spent the weekend in Trujillo roaming around a bit as we have described above. It was a bit sad to leave our room where we kind of settled in already. We had a two day trip in front of us…We arrived to Lima without any hiccups, took a taxi to the next bus terminal from which we were to depart in the evening to Cusco. After checking-in the bags (or so we thought) we had some breakfast at the bus station (don’t think of the bus station as an usual filthy shack but imagine an airport terminal of sorts)…

Anyway during breakfast we made the final decision to make it to Pachacamac, a massive archeological site from AD 200. We took a taxi to the outskirts of Lima where we were supposed to catch a bus to Pachacamac. On the way the taxi driver gave us a local newspaper so that we could read it on the way (some kind of a perk I guess). There began the terror – on page 1 we see the bus of the company we were supposed to board in the evening, totally smashed after a frontal accident with another bus…On page two there is an article about again the bus of the same company being assaulted on the way to the south. Rita told me that 39 people were shot dead and robbed. I could not believe it since the story was on page two. After consulting the driver we figured out that people were alive but without their belongings and even clothing as the bus was stopped during the night and robbed.

Both accidents happened just a day before. It did not inspire us positively but in the evening we nevertheless boarded our bus to Cusco - a 16 hour trip which we thought would be as comfortable as the ride to Lima. The bus was indeed much more comfortable than an average long haul bus in Europe but still not as nice as we expected…We were a bit scared…but there we were – on the way to Cusco…