Trujillo and surroundings

In America, Peru 2001 On  01/06/2001  One comment

I arrived in Trujillo at 4am. As I was the only person to get off the bus that was going to Lima, once again, I suffered the fight of taxi drivers for my backpack. This time I got a little scared because I was not in a bus terminal, I was alone in a dark street. I decided not to argue and let them fight to decide who was going to take me. Well, the louder one earned.

To visit the ruins I didn’t want to get a tour, I decided to go by myself. In the morning I visited the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna. It is not known if they really were temples of the sun and moon. The name was given by the Spaniard when they arrived in the place and they thought these were Inca constructions. They did not know these were constructions from the Moche period, from hundreds of years before Incas.

Only one of the temples is opened to visits. I could see the different rooms, the sacrifice place and where they had found ceramic, skeletons and objects in gold, silver and copper. The drawings in the walls show a threatening god. Archaeologists are working in the place. They had started already late, in 1990, only after many of objects had been stolen by the “huaqueros”. It looks like there is still a lot of work to be done.

Another archeological site near to Trujillo is Chan Chan. It has a great part already restored. El Niño destroyed a little the work done by the archaeologists, today some of the places have iron bars to hold the structures. The Chan Chan was constructed by Chimu people, around 1300 ac. It is estimated that there lived about 60.000 inhabitants. The drawings on the walls are inspired by oceans themes such as fish and rays. There is also a small museum showing indigenous models and ceramics.

I continued the road to Huanchaco, where I spend the night. It is a beach known by its surfers and caballitos de totora. It was empty, the cold and bad weather explain it. What took me there was the idea of seeing the fisherman even nowadays uses theses little boats made of reed (caballitos de totora). They are individual boats where the fisherman seat as if he was riding a horse. They launch themselves to the sea to fish and usually catch small fish and crab. It is interesting to see that the boats have a good malleability even on big waves.

The women and children wait on the beach for the arrival of the fishermen. They help them to count the fish and separated it in their baskets. The ceramics from the region show the local people using this kind of boat hundreds of years ago. I loved the place, mainly because the progress has not arrive everywhere, the fishermen still keep an old tradition that it is preserved until today.