Northern Peruvian Ruins
A day trip from Huaraz to Chavin de Huantar, a pre-Inca site built around 900BC. We were looking forward to the visit as we thought that the ruins would be something different, in the end we were disappointed. We had thought that there would be stone heads (cabezas clavas) coming out of the walls, but in fact there was only one left in-situ.
The famous labyriths of the temple were also disappointing – just some stone rooms which happed to have roofs on them, so seem labyrith-like. I am sure that it is important archaeologically, but we had higher expectations.
On the other hand, after a night bus to Trujillo – on the coast, the ruins of Chan Chan were amazing. Chan Chan is the worlds largest city built out of adobe and it does leave a lasting impression on you. There are several temples, but you can only visit one (the Tschudi complex). It consits of 3 squares, each one with less ornate decoration than the last and some amazing general ruins with elaborate walls and different representations of earth, sea and air.
These ruins are nowhere near as old as those of Chavin (c.850 – 1470) but are certainly one of our favourites so far.
Also close to Chan Chan are the Huacas (temples) del Sol y de al Luna. They both appear to be pyramids, but are in fact a series of temples which have been rebuilt on over the years. The Huaca del Sol hasn’t been excavated yet and you can’t visit it, but the Huaca de la Luna was very impressive. It doesn’t look much at first glance, but once you get inside there are a series of temples with ornate carvings/reliefs on the walls depicting the gods. It is on different levels as they think every 100 years or so the temple was completely fill in with mud bricks and a new on built on the top. There are 5 levels, and because of this building on top of each temple, it is going to be hard to every see the first level.
After being wowed with the inside of the 3,4 and 5th levels we were taken to the northern side – the main entrance. Thisdid take our breath away – lots of levels each with a different set of carvings, depicting human sacrifices, spiders, snakes, dancers and other scences.
Tags: Chan Chan, Peru, Ruins, Travel
Jenni
Leave a Reply