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I apologise now for the lateness of this entry, and in advance for the quality, although I should have done so for every one of them. I have been far too relaxed and to be honest a bit spaced our from all the sunbathing here in Mancora, our place to rest and prepare for the year ahead...
Barranca was fun. We stayed in a sleazy hotel and had Chinese for dinner every night, and visited the 5000 year old "pyramids". After this we got the bus to Trujillo, in order to visit another archaeological site, Chan Chan. By this point I was getting ill so spent the first day lying in bed watching TV, which I may have secretly enjoyed if it were not for the fact that the same adverts came on about every 5 minutes. Lawrence made it out and brought me some nice cakes and reported back that Trujillo was nice, which it was. Same colonial buildings and plazas as we have seen before, but definitely less on the Gringo trail than southern Peru. Nevertheless it still gets a lot of tourists due to its proximity to remnants of the Moche and Chimu civilisations, which don´t get as much press as the Inca one does. These cultures are much older, ancient in fact, but still produced some beautiful work. We saw lots of delightful artefacts in the archaeological museum, and I mean delightful as they were truly charming - pottery with cute faces and the like as well as quite intricate carvings, pictures and weaves. The museum was really informative and in a nice old colonial mansion, and whetted our appetite for a visit to Chan Chan, the Chimu mud city which is the world's largest city built out of adobe. We caught a local bus and walked the rest of the way, and it turned out to be great, despite our initial impression from afar that it was just a sandy mountain. They have been reconstructing it from more mud to show what it looked like, and it certainly looked good. Lots of beautiful sandy lattice walls (which in their day were painted white), and bas reliefs of fish, birds and geometric patterns. We wandered round (temperatures well into pleasant now) and enjoyed it. That same night we got another bus to Chiclayo, which had been recommended to us by quite a few Peruvians and looked really interesting for the historical sights nearby.
Chiclayo is known as the capital of friendship, and I think it lived up to its name. People were really friendly and kind. For example, no taxi ripoffs and Lawrence was given a button for free in the market (he needed it as he lost the one on his trousers months ago). I know a button is just a button, but in some places that would never have happened. For examle in La Paz one woman would only let him buy 20. The owner of said button stall was delighted to be able to help. I must mention that we also saw and smelt one of the finest market stalls ever. We have seen many amazing fruit, vegetable and seafood markets during our time away, which could also have the title of finest ever, but we perhaps have seen so many that they now seem commonplace. Its going to be tough just having Victoria market. Anyway, this stall sold herbs of huge size, quantity and quality, although I have no idea what you would do with them all. But it smelled beautiful.
We decided to head to Sipán oursleves, to see the recently discovered Moche tombs of the Lord of Sipán. I had no idea they were going to be so good. He was buried complete with his wives, a child, dog and llama along with a few others to guard his tomb. Their jewellery, clothing and masks are all beautiful, and archaeologists have discovered a lot of it, in gold, silver and copper. We wandered round a small on-site museum and then round the weathered pyramids which contained the various tombs, enjoying it a lot, partly due to the glorious sunshine. After this we caught another bus to Lambayeque to visit the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán, which contains more artefacts from Sipán, and was also a great museum which must have had lots of money spent on it.
We had a spare day before our night bus the next day, so we decided to head to Piemental, a small coastal town. At first the weather was not perfect beach weather, and the whole place had an Lytham St Annes or another small coastal town in the north of England, off-season feel. This is appealing in its own way and we strolled along the windy beach before running a gauntlet of beach restaurants seemingly desperate for us to sit and eat. We picked the nicest looking yet reasonably priced one with seats outside, and the sun started to appear. This turned out to be one of our best meals in Peru, and we have been making the most of the now available seafood option. I had tortilla de raya (stingray omelette) and Lawrence had ceviche mixto, which I have now also been converted to. This is raw fish and seafood marinated in lemon, and it is spicy and tangy and delicious. By the time we had finished it was definitely sunny and warm, and we decided to pay the 1 sole each to go to the end of the most rickety (ricketiest?) pier I have ever seen. It curled gracefully round, and at the end there were people fishing and nice ramshackle buildings. Then we sat in the plaza for an hour or two, appreciating being able to have the time to do this kind of thing while we can. By some misfortune (or incompetance) we missed our paid-for bus but luckily we were able to catch another bus to Mancora. We slept soundly and failed to get off at the right place, partly because the bus never actually stopped. Having realised that we had passed through Mancora, we were able to get off at Tumbes, not too far way but next to the border with Equador. The police were really kind and friendly and stopped the next vehicle going back our way for us. So we hopped in a van and got dropped off before dawn, it all turned out ok in the end, as I am now realising it usually does, despite my occasional panics.
Since then we have done nothing much except lie on the beach, play bat and ball and eat lots of seafood and ice cream. Mancora is where the rich Peruvians come on holiday, it is a typical beach resort place but it is fairly low key and quiet. We have found a good quiet spot on the beach, where we can see surfers and kitesurfers in the distance, as well as birds divebombing for fish. The most exciting thing to have happened is when the sea breached, well actually destroyed, the sea wall and unfortunately flooded some of the beachside restaurants. But the damage does not seem severe. So I assume we will continue on in this fashion until we get bored when we might venture to the nearby mudbaths or go trekking. We are contemplating our return quite a lot, making plans and resolutions. It is quite exciting to think about coming back but also daunting.
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