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We spent two full days in Mancora (which is apparently THE Peruvian beach town) which was a nice break after some of the long bus ride and intense travel days in Ecuador. The surf wasn't too bad so I bit the bullet and hired a long board and attempted to go for a surf in the first time in over 10 years - it wasn't pretty but I had a ball. The sefood in Mancora was also fantastic, so I gorged on this. To be honest I liked the laid back and kind-of run-down feel to the place, hopefully it doesn't boom too much more and get over run with resorts.
After Mancora we headed further south by bus to a small coastal town called Huancacho famous for its local men fishing from woven reed boats. What was really amazing here was a ruin we visited just outside of town called Chan Chan. I'd personally never heard of it, I doubt many have, it was built by a pre-Inca civilization and what was amazing about it was the sheer scale of its governors palaces (10 of them in all), which ranged in size from 4-20 hectares. The reason for so many was that each time a governor died they built a new palace and sealed the old one up as a tomb. They were palaces not in a traditional western sense but more like a compound, surrounded by a 12-meter high mud brick wall, containing inner courtyards, for gathering, military practice, worship and markets. They also contained various temple precincts, barracks, offices for the bureaucracy (inevitable for a large civilization). The palaces were built on the sandy-desert like coastal plain so that the land in the nearby fertile valleys could be retained for agriculture. Though desert it had a fairly shallow water table and the citadel we visited had dug down to this in one courtyard and made an artificial lake for the governor to stroll around and frolic in. To be honest the whole area looked like something that you would have envisioned to come from '101 Arabian Nights' not sitting in coastal South America.
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