White Around The World

I spent my last few days in Peru visiting a few places in the far north. I spent 2 days in Chiclayo, a big city but it doesn´t have much for tourists. I went on a tour which visited an archaeological site and a couple of museums about pre-Incan tombs found in the area. There aren´t many foreign tourists in this part of Peru, and I was the only non-Peruvian on the tour. For everyone else the highlight of the tour seemed to be when we drove past the house where Miss World 1988 grew up, but I found the museums more interesting. The following day I went a couple of hours further north to Piura, mainly just because I had a spare day before meeting up with Cathy, my friend from home. There wasn´t much to do in the city so I went to a nearby village which apparently has the biggest craft market in Northern Peru. And yes it was big, but practically everyone was selling the same things and most of them were wooden spoons, so I wasn´t too impressed by that.

My next stop was Mancora, a very nice little town on the beach a few hours from the border with Ecuador. Here I met up with Cathy and we spent the following day catching up on the beach, before spending the next day travelling to Ecuador.

After a day and a night on buses I arrived at Chachapoyas at about 5am so spent the rest of the day enjoying doing not a lot. Chachapoyas is only a small town and there isn´t really much to do in the actual town itself, but there a lot of pre-Incan ruins to see in the surrounding cloud forest. So I arranged a 4 day trip starting the next day. THe first day we mainly spent in a taxi. We did have a stop off at a burial site where the bodies were buried in a cliff to void flooding and they placed wooden figures at the entrances to the caves containing the bodies. From there the road was just a muddy track, I think the taxi driver was soon regretting agreeing to the job as after getting stuck a few times his car was covered in mud both inside and out. When we left the taxi (with doubts that he would ever make it back up the road without anyone to push) we had a short walk to our 1st nights accommodation in the Valle de Belen. We were staying in a house in the middle of the valley 3hours walk from the closest village. It was an amazing place, so quiet and relaxing with just us and a lot of cows. In the evening we had a fire outside and sat looking at the stars and finding out more about the area from the guy from the village who was staying to look after the cows.

The 2nd day was the main day of trekking. Initially we had to cross the river in the valley and then we followed a pre-Incan path up the other side of the valley to the top. Then we started descending into the next valley and the scenery just completely changed as we entered the cloud forest, which was also surprisingly cloudy after the clear skies on the other side of the hill. After stopping for lunch we reached an area of ruins where a pre-Incan village of more than 3000 round houses made of stone. The government is spending a lot of money excavating at Kuelap, a similar site nearby, so no work has been done at this place, so it was really interesting to see the place in its wild state where the forest has just taken over. Anywhere where you just walked a short way from the main path into the forest you could find more buildings. The area the site covers is huge and in the dense forest difficult to access, so there must still be a lot there which remains undiscovered. The rest of the afternoon was sent walking down through the forest to the village of Congon. As we got closer to the village we saw areas of the forest being burnt and cleared, according to our guide this is illegal, and done because they want more space for coffee plantations.

We stayed in a really nice house in the village and had a nice evening there. We had a good dinner and finally found some half decent coffee in South America. But then we were sat on the balcony watching the owners sort, process and dry coffee beans, so it shouldn´t have been so surprising. In the evening we went to the village shop which also just seemed to be a general meeting place for everyone and had the only TV in the village. Here we tried the local alcohol, some kind of sugar cane rum, as with all the locally made alcoholic drinks I have tried on this tip, it was disgusting but you have to drink it anyway. We also spent a long time playing a game that is popular here that involves throwing metal discs at a board with various different holes in it, worth different values, obviously without much success on my part.

The following day was a long day of horse riding. We set off at 7am, riding up the valley through spectacular scenery. My horse took a bit of getting used to, but after fighting off all the other horses it made it to the front of the group and then calmed down. It was a really steep climb out of the valley on a muddy track that must have been very difficult for the horses. We arrived at the top and went for a walk through the forest to another area of unexcavated houses and a viewpoint looking back over the valley. We had lunch here, at the only house for miles around. Then we had another few hours of difficult horse riding before reaching the top of the pass. Here we left the horses and had a nice 3 hour walk down to the village of Choctamal where we stayed the night.

The following day we went to see the pre-Incan fortress at Kuelap. In a way it has been likened to Macchu Pichu as it is situated at the top of a hill overlooking al the surrounding valleys and is a large complex of houses, temples and other buildings. In some ways I found it more impressive than Macchu Pichu We spent a long time being shown around the site. It was nice to have seen similar unexcavated sites in the previous few days to see what a difference the archaeologists make. Even though only a small part of the site has been restored, the rest of it looked very different from what we had seen before. It was also interesting to see how the site and buildings had been modified first when the Incas took over the area and then later when the Spanish arrived. We ended spending nearly 5 hours there before driving back to Chachapoyas late in the afternoon.

Unfortunatly when we arrived back at the hotel we found that our luggage and things that had apparently been left in the safe had been gone through and some things had been taken, although most of it was of little value. Its a long story and I have written too much already but by about 2am, most of our missing belongings had been returned and a temporary member of staff had been taken to the police, so things turned out OK in the end.

From Huaraz I had to back track a bit and spend a day in Trujillo, to get back my camera that I somehow managed to leave there when I was there before. From there I got the bus to Cajamarca. There isn´t really much to do in Cajamrca, it has a few small archaelogical sites, but nothing as impressive as in other parts of Peru. My main reason for going there was to meet up with Cathy, my friend from Glasgow who is doing a work placement there for a month. So we had a very enjoyable couple of days catching up on all the news from home and everything that we´ve been up to over the last year or so. For a while I have been thinking of finally booking flights home, it is going to have to happen sooner rather than later, while I still have money left to pay for them. I almost booked them, but haven´t quite managed it yet.

I finally made it to Huaraz after the strikes ended. Its a relatively small town in the best area for climbing and trekking in Peru. I spent the day finding out about trekking in the area and eventually decided to go for an 8 day trek on the Huayhuash circuit, apparently the 2nd best trek in the world, after the Annapurna Circuit. And the trek itself didn't disappoint. I loved all 8 days of the walking, each day we hiked over high passes through spectacular scenery of high snow covered mountains, glaciers, lakes and past small villages where you would think it was impossible to live. Each day we had at least one high pass to climb of between 4500-5000m but luckily I felt unaffected by the altitude so could enjoy the walk without too much of a struggle. And everyday we started out quite early in the morning to reach the campsite by mid afternoon as for a few hours in the afternoon the weather always seemed to be bad, we experienced high winds, heavy rain, hail and snow storms, but the majority of the time we had clear sunny weather. The 4th day of the trek was the shortest day and we were camping near some hot springs, where we spent the afternoon having a very welcome wash, the only opportunity on the trek. Although the trek itself was amazing, our guide and the service we received on the trek was appalling. We had been promised an English speaking professional guide and a cook, we only had one guy with us who only seemed to know one word of English (lunch) and seemed to spend the whole time trying to avoid us, so although I can speak relatively good Spanish it was still very difficult to get even the most basic information from him. The tents we had were not suitable for camping in the mountains, none of the zips worked and after a few days mine had a huge hole in the roof, not good for camping in a snow storm. Due to our 'guide' being so bad, I decided he must just be a cook normally, but he wasn't much better at that. Food included a piece of stale bread for breakfast and sugar sandwiches for lunch. The evening meal was basically the same every night except for the final night where we paid extra to have something different and try the local speciality of Pachamanca, lamb and potatoes cooked underground by hot rocks. This meant a bit of late night shopping for me. After dinner the night before, the only Spanish speaker in the group I was sent up the hill from the camp to visit the farmer and choose us a sheep. It was a bit different from shopping at Tesco.

So the trek itself was amazing and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys trekking but I definitely wouldn't recommend booking with either Quecha Explorers or Monttrek.

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.