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We finally arrived into North Peru and made a beeline for the coast only to find that as its winter it was all mist and not much sun. Still its nice to see the ocean again and watch the waves breaking against the shore. Lots of brave surfers out in their wet suits and also lots of the local fishermen trying to catch dinner from the pier and from their reed canoe type boats. Another benefit of being by the coast was the amazing seafood and we made the most of it, ceviche, barbecued prawns and squid.. Yum yum!
Not much to say about Trujillo itself, yet another landscaped main square with brightly coloured colonial houses and a cathedral. But around Trujillo there were some really cool ruins of ancient pre-Incan civilisations. The Huacas de Moche includes two pyramids made of adobe by the Moche civilisation almost 16 centuries ago. Only one of the pyramids has been excavated, Huaca de la Luna, which is thought to have been the ceremonial and religious centre of the Moche people. Huaca de la Luna was built in 7 levels, but strangely instead of keeping each of the levels for use when they built another the Moche covered the previous levels in with bricks. The Moche also liked to sacrifice humans but at least they drugged them before they killed them by feeding them the juice of the San Pedro cactus so that they were hallucinating when they were brutally killed and then left outside the Huaca to be eaten by whatever creatures came along!
The most interesting thing about the Huaca were huge murals which are still incredibly vivid in black, red, blue, white, and yellow despite some fading due to the sun and weather. We hadn´t seen anything like this elsewhere and it really was amazing to see, one of the murals is 7 levels high depicting celebrations, soldiers leading captured enemies, spiders, dancers celebrating and Ayapec, the main God for this civilisation).
We also visited Chan Chan which is a 20 square km adobe city from the 9th century which was built by the Chimu civilisation who conquered the Moche before themselves being conquered by the Incas in the 15th century! To say that the city itself is huge is an understatement, we walked through endless corridors and massive ceremonial plazas of adobe with intricate murals and carvings in them. The main administrative area has murals across the walls of fishing nets which give the whole place the feel of walking through honeycomb. The murals are amazing and all of them depict scenes from the sea with fish, ducks, fishing nets etc. A burial tomb is also located in the city where the ruler and all his possesions and his wives and concubines were buried with him.
And then it was time to leave Peru and head into Ecuador on yet another nightbus! Our 3rd in 4 nights, we were both dying for a proper bed!
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