So, sorry to leave you hanging... but I have been traveling quite a lot here in Peru over the past week and haven't really stopped to use the Internet all that much. So let me detail the whirldwind tour of Peruvian ruins.
On Saturday, Michael, Rianne, and I went with our guide Jesus from the town of Chachapoyas in the remote Peruvian Amazonas province to the fortress of Kuelap. After our crazy journey across the border over the previous two days, we really did not feel like getting in a tiny car and bouncing over atrocious roads for three hours to the site. But that was the only way there. Kuelap was built by the Chachapoyans, a pre-Incan culture that fought the Incans for decades before being conquered. They had a huge fortress on this cliff. Kuelap is bigger than Machu Pichu, but no one goes to Kuelap because it is so remote. In fact, only 2000 foreigners visited Kuelap in the whole year last year. We were the only people there. Us plus one American guy who was supposedly some kind of shaman. He decided to take a mixture of San Pedro and ayahuasca, very powerful hallucinogens. Then he went to the highest point in the fortress to do this ritual. I can't imagine a tour guide in the United States saying, Oh, we have to hang on while one of the tourists does drugs on the top of that cliff where he could hallucinate and plunge into oblivion. But that's what Jesus's attitude was toward the situation. When our shaman friend returned, we continued to walk through the fortress, and it looked like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. There were bromeliads and orchids growing out of original walls that were a hundred feet tall. There were temples with images of snake eyes and puma eyes. There were crumbling Chachapoyan and Incan houses.
On the drive back, we would sometimes have to get out of the car, because with people in it, it weighed too much to get through the mud. So we would get out, push the car through mud, and get back in. Finally, we arrived at the small town of Leymebamba. Jesus found out that the local people had just found out about karaoke, so it was the "inauguration" of karaoke for the town. We were invited to drink a lot of very cheap liquor (which I declined), while they fiddled helplessly with the computer program. It was a complete fiasco. The people could not figure out how to use the karaoke technology, and a lot of people just ended up singing randomly while getting drunk for free. They didn't seem to understand that they were supposed to be reading the lyrics and singing along to the tune. They would just grab the microphone and start singing whatever. It was hilarious... a complete failure... but hilarious.
In the morning, we went to the museum of Leymebamba, where they are storing 219 mummies that they found in local Chachapoyan tombs. They had to move them from the original sites, because graverobbers would sack the tombs, slice open the mummies, and take out any gold or silver the dead people were wearing. So a lot of mummies have been destroyed. It was insane to be in this room filled with intact pre-Incan mummies, some with the skeletons clearly visible, some wrapped in beautiful fabrics. In this tiny museum in the middle of nowhere. They are all in the fetal position, and then they would be placed in tombs on the sides of cliffs.
After seeing the mummies themselves, we went to one of the original mausoleums where the mummies had been found. The site was called Revash. And I became horribly ill. I had problems with parasites. Again. For the third time. And I almost threw up, and the sun got so hot, we were boiling. We hiked and hiked. And I kept stopping, in so much stomach pain... but long after my companions, I finally arrived. Revash reminded me a lot of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. They are little houses built into the cliff like that, except they are not houses, they are their cemetary. The mummies would be placed in these structures on the cliffside. And the mausoleums were painted with images of pumas and other animals in bright reds and yellows.
We arrived very late back in Chachapoyas, and it was time to take a ten hour overnight bus from Chachapoyas to Chiclayo, going from the eastern side of the Andes mountains, the edge of the rainforest, over to the wesetern Andes, and descending into the coastal desert. The ride was very scary. I tried to sleep, but at one point, I made the mistake of looking at my window, and I almost panicked. Because by the light of the moon, all I could see below me was rushing water!!! No road!!! Because the bus was literally on the edge of the gorge, with mere centimeters between a rock cliff on the right and a flooded river on the left. The funny thing was, this was supposedly a two-way route! But I have no idea what the bus would have done if another car had come along, because it took up the whole entire road by itself!!!
After a lot of carsickness and hairpin weaving through dark mountains, we arrived in Chiclayo at 6 in the morning. We spent the day going to visit the archeological site at Tucume, a huge pre-Incan city. Unfortunately, we were disappointed because it just looked like mud piles because they have not excavated it yet. Then, we went to a museum that showed a lot of the pre-Incan gold. It was the Bruning Museum in Lambayeque. The museum we wanted to see, the Lord of Sipan, was closed on mondays.
Michael went on to meet his girlfriend in Lima, but Rianne and I spent the night in a bad hotel so we could go see the Museum of Sipan in the morning. Tuesday morning, we went to see the museum, and it was amazing! The nearby tombs of Sipan look like the pyramids of Tucume, mud piles in the desert. However, they have excavated Sipan. But all the stuff they discovered is in the museum to protect it. Before the Incans, the Chimu culture lived in the northern desert. Before the Chimu was the empire of the Moches. The lords of the Moche culture were buried with huge amounts of gold and turquoise and silver. We saw earrings the size of tea plates and nose rings bigger than half a man's face, and granpa complains about my piercings!! The gold and all the ornaments and jewelry were unbelievable, and the items are priceless. I really felt like I was stepping back into a Moche temple 1000 years ago. We also learned about how all of the women, military leaders, and priests, of the lord would be buried with him to accompany him to the next life. They actually considered this an honor!
In the afternoon, it was goodbye to dusty Chiclayo, on a four hour bus south to the coastal city of Trujillo. What I didn't realize before coming here, was that the coastal region of northern Peru is a vast desert! It looks like southern Arizona! I would look out the bus window at sand, sand, and more sand. Then I would go to sleep for two hours, wake up, and see sand, sand, and more sand. It was like a twilight zone. Finally, we arrived in Trujillo. We made our way to the nearby small town of Huanchuco, which is on the ocean and where we found a cheap hostel before spending the evening swimming in the sea and watching the sun set.
Wednesday morning, we went to the Huaca de la Luna (or Moon Temple), another ancient structure of the Moche. Unlike Tucume, however, Huaca de la Luna had been excavated, and brilliantly painted murals appeared as archeologists dug through the pyramids. It was strange to stand in a brightly painted room, thinking about the human sacrifices that were happening in this brilliant temple 800 years ago.
In the afternoon, we went to Chan Chan. Chan Chan was the capital for the Chimu Empire, the culture after the Moche and before the Incas in this region. The city was huge, with 300,000 inhabitants and miles and miles of area. There were at least 8 palaces, but only one has been excavated. The palaces are constructed like a maze so that anyone coming in who wasn't supposed to be there would get hopelessly lost. The walls were made of adobe, and the mud was carved into all sorts of geometric shapes and animal designs. Standing in these pyramids and temples in the desert, I felt like I was in Egypt, not in South America! We also got to see where they buried their lords, again with all of the women, servants, military leaders, and priests, as human sacrifices to accompany their lord. Don't worry, though! They didn't even know what was going on when they were sacrificed, our tour guide explained, because they would take the halucinogeno San Pedro cactus before their throats were slit!!! Ew!!!
Well, after a long week of trekking around the Northern Peruvian desert exploring ancient ruins, it's time to leave Egypt... er, Peru. Tonight, I am starting a veeeeeeeeerrrry long two day trek from Trujillo, Peru, to Banos, Ecuador. If Ecuador lets me back in and everything goes according to my very very tentative plan, I will let you know that I am alive and well in Ecuador once I reach Banos.
Call me Elizabeth "Indiana Jones" Dumford...
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