Cajamarca to Trujillo
So the 310 kilometer drive which really only covered 120 kilometers from the Andes town of Cajamarca down to coastal city of Trujillo truly was beautiful. Cajamarca sits in a valley surrounded by mountains. The mountains are not so impressive in height, but they have a patchwork of farmlands and the various greens are quite nice. As with the trip to the Cumbe Mayo ruins (oops… I realize now that I have not posted my story about Cajamarca Carnaval – I’ll finish it up soon), leaving Cajamarca first involves winding up and out of the valley through the farmlands. As Cajamarca gets smaller we drove through smaller and smaller villages. Don’t blink or you’ll miss each one of these groupings of homes. These are not proper villages according to America and British standards – no post office (US) and no church (UK) and there certainly is no pub to be seen.
But what we did get to see was Peruvian farmlife in action. Nothing like coming around the corner and a hundred sheep are running down the road. Better yet and certainly something that gives you clue that we’re not in Kansas is a farmer with his group (herd?) of llamas. I’ve noticed that Peru is doing its best to curb global warming by using sheep and llamas in the towns, cities and at some of the tourist sites like Machu Picchu to mow the lawns. There is definitely a system where the herder brings his throng to your yard to chew it down to size. I suppose some scientist will soon tell us that sheep farting especially combined with llama gas is the true cause of global warming. In the meantime, it is very nice not to hear lawnmowers. Well, that’s stretching it since all I ever hear in Peru is the honking horns. Maybe that’s it… they use the animals to curb the extraneous noises so we can all enjoy the CONSTANT horn symphony.
The bus finally gets to the top of the pass. Below us is a river valley, but it looks like it will take forever to get to the bottom. The mountainsides surrounding us have a never-ending ribbon of “highway” wrapped around them and presumably headed down from here. I believe this qualifies as a highway in Peru. It is paved and it is wider than the width of a truck. Specifically, it is five meters wide or just thin enough so that two trucks cannot drive by each other without being extremely careful. Around the bends – there are only bends on this road – one of the vehicles has to stop and allow the oncoming one to cut the corner. The corners are too narrow and too sharp for a truck to stay on its side. The trucks come in convoys with a lead pickup or car with signage telling you how many trucks are following. So, you get to the corner and park and wait until all of those trucks have cleared. I was on a safe bus and this is how we did it, but I am absolutely sure that some of the buses that passed us take a different method and just blow through each corner on a wing and a prayer. It took us four hours to go the first 100 kilometers. I normally do not do the conversion for you (it is about time all of us Americans and Brits start using metric system!), but to make sure you truly understand our progress so far that is 15 miles per hour!!!
To the right of the highway along this route is a cliff sometimes hundreds of meters in height. The valley is very large and steep and the most amazing thing is seeing the worked farm fields so far up the mountains away from the road or any homes. Rwanda has amazingly steep fields using terraces, but Peru takes it to a whole new level for me. The Incas and probably the pre-Inca societies built many terraces on the sides of the mountains which are still used and expanded upon today. All I can say is that these fields look impossible and therefore looked like they were painted on a canvas rather than real. This is a big scenery place and my mind has difficulty processing it as something more than a painting or film. Even at just 25 kph!
I could say “we finally made it to the bottom…”, but I was truly enjoying the show. Every curve brought a new view into my sight and since I was in the first row on the second floor of the bus (I did tell you how luxurious these buses are, right?) with a huge window less than two meters in front of me, it really was like watching a big movie playing. We finally hit a real town once we made it to the bottom of the valley alongside the river. The rest of the ride to near the coast where we run into the Panamerican Highway (sounds impressive) runs along this river. The change in altitude brought us into a drier area. Instead of maize, potatoes, quinoa and other crops of the Andes, the farms are now growing rice flooding large areas using water from the river. The sides of the mountains became more bare and rocky as we headed towards the coast. Coastal Peru is extremely dry so I was not surprised to enter an area where only cacti and other desert plants thrive on their own. The area is very similar looking to the canyons of the Mojave Desert area. There are no sheep or llamas running around here nor is there any lawns for them to mow. None of the towns looked appealing. Luckily, the rate the bus was traveling had picked up considerably.
The Panamerican Highway is not impressive. It is a normal two lane road with a lot of truck traffic. And a lot of crazy passing of those trucks. I’m sure the annual death toll on this road is very high. The sun was setting over the nearby Pacific Ocean which was fine because the scenery was now harsh with just rocky areas and blowing sand and a real movie in English that interested me (Deja Vu) was playing on the TV screen. We rolled into Trujillo six and one half hours after our start. It is the second largest city in Peru and I can just say that I am again not impressed. For all the beauty of the small and medium cities of Peru, the two largest sure are ugly. Just a massive sprawl of two million people. I’ll know more over the next three weeks, but it appears that the cities in the mountains reflect the beauty of those mountains and the cities of the coast reflect its dry ugliness. The hills and mountains surrounding Trujillo are dark tan in color and just about every building in the area is the same color having been built from bricks using that same earth. Luckily, there is some paint to break up some of the monotony.
Tags: peru, south america, Travel
vagabondrick
Wow Rick, what adventures and experiences you have been having. All my best wishes for your future forays. love Kathy