BootsnAll Travel Network



Trujillo

I arrived in Trujillo early in the morning and tried to get a taxi to take me to a hostel.  As seems to be common in Peru, the taxi drivers don´t like to take you where you want to go as they all seem to get commission from other places.  So I was taken to a much more expensive hotel where i had no intention of staying but I left my bag until check in time and went for a walk around the city centre.  Having got myself organised, booked a tour for the day and found a much better place to stay I went back to the hotel and told them I had changed my mind and thanked them for the free bag storage. 
I spent the day on a tour of some archaeological sites in the surrounding area.  In the morning we visited the temples of the sun and moon, in part of a city built by the pre-Incan Moche culture.  The temple of the moon had been excavated so we were able to go in parts of it.  It was a really interesting building.  The area is very dry but occasionally there are big floods caused by El Nino.  When the temples flooded they would just fill them in with clay bricks and build another temple on top of it, so it forms a pyramid shape.  In total there were 5 temples on top of each other, all with the same basic design.  The most impressive thing about the buildings was the brightly coloured wall paintings that had survived with in some cases very little damage.  You could see that in each temple the design of the patterns had been modified slightly as the culture changed over time. 

After lunch we visited Chan Chan, a huge archaeological site of 9 palaces, built by the Chuimu culture, which followed after the Moches.  We spent hours just looking round 1 of the temples.  Was really interesting to see how the culture and architecture had changes in a few hundred years as the culture developed and how they adapted to cope better with the rainy seasons.  Was also really interesting to see how within just a few hundred years the beliefs of the society had completely changed, from worshiping mountains to the moon.  So thanks to having a really good duide for a change, the day was really interesting.
 
I had wanted to leave that night to get to Huaraz, but the strikes meant there were still no buses, so instead I spent the following day in Huanachaco, a small town a little bit further up the coast, where I made the best of the good weather and enjoyed a relaxing day on the beach.

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