From the Desert to the Glaciers in One Fun-Filled Day!
Exhausted from dragging ourselves from colectivo to bus to museum, only to struggle to translate archaeological terms from Spanish to English, we splurged on a guided tour of several Moche Pyramids and Chan Chan (once the largest mud-brick city in the world). Our tour guide, Michael, arrived in Trujillo 18 years ago from England and never went back. He was full of fun facts like asparagus is the number one cash crop in Peru and lots more that have slipped away because, well, most of them were about as memorable as the asparagus one. But he did have a lot to say about sites that otherwise would have looked like piles of sand in the middle of the desert (except, of course, for the truly unbelievable art carved into the walls of the Moche Temple of the Moon).
It was nice being ferried from site to site not having to worry about how to get there, and how to get there cheap, and what to look at when we got there. We’re realizing just how much of our time is spent navigating public transportation systems… needless to say… it’s a lot. If we hadn’t gone on the tour, we probably wouldn’t have made it to the Moche temples, which turned out to be a favorite, covered in stylized geometric and pictorial friezes to which the original color still clung after something like 1500 years in the middle of a windswept desert prone (weirdly) to floods and (not weirdly) to earthquakes. Mind blowing. Replete with obligatory stories of human sacrifice that everyone seems so obsessed with — the National Geographic article on the sites wouldn’t shut up about the “gory, blood splattered warrior culture of the Moche” and managed to forget about the impressive art they created. The pyramids were strangely modern, like they’d been designed by one of the clean-cut, suit-wearing Trading Spaces designers. AND, everything was handicap accessible as the Moche preferred ramps to stairs. So… there you go… Wesleyan University could learn some important lessons from them.
Chan Chan, on the other hand, was far more extensive and much less well preserved. The town of Trujillo had expanded to engulf the ruins after the 1970 earthquake, and so wandering through the crumbling mud brick walls while glimpsing much flimsier modern concrete buildings was trippy. We’re not exaggerating when we say that Chan Chan was extensive, I mean, the place was freakin’ huge. It was a vast expanse of walls spreading out over the desert covered with the remains of fish, bird, and fishing net designs. It must have been a truly inspiring place in its heyday. Now, however, it reminded us both of some kind of man-made Badlands resembling those in South Dakota. Weird, but true. Luckily our guide brought the place to life a bit. I’m sure we wouldn’t have gotten much out of it if we were just wandering around by ourselves in the desert. Archaeologists are currently working hard to preserve the site from El Niño phenomena and desert winds, which often means covering up the most interesting, best preserved carvings in order to save them for an unknown time in the future. The perfect illustration of “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Both the saying and the archaeologists actions make little sense to either of us.
Anyway, we left the desert and are now staying in the Cordillera Blanca at the foot of snow-capped peaks that reach 6000 meters above sea level. Peru is trippy man. Send some extra oxygen our way.
-Las Dos
Tags: Peru, Ruins, South America, Travel
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