Ruined

As we are winding our way south down the Peruvian coast visiting pre-Inca ruins, I am simultaneously traveling down the Andes a hundred or so kilometers east with Dervla Murphy.  In the 1980s, she walked with her daughter, Rachel, and their mule, Juana, from Cajamarca to Cusco, roughly following the Inca trail and the path Pizarro took in the 1500s.

Previous blogs have created the impression that we are spending all of our time in Peru at the beach.  While it is true that we try to camp near the beach whenever we can, we have also visited fascinating (at least to me) archeological sites, museums, and otherwise famous places.

One of the beach highlights was a night we spent in Cabo Blanco.  In 1953, an American named Alfred Glassell, Jr caught a 1650 pound black marlin (the biggest black marlin caught with a fishing rod, ever) which reportedly inspired Hemingway to write El Veijo y la Mar and later to go to Cabo Blanco with a boatload of movie stars to film it.  Everyone we met over 30 years old said they remember him!

We spent a few days in Lambayeque while Luc changed a tire and did some tuning up.  Lambayeque is the site of the museum of the Royal Tombs of Sipán (around 1 - 500 AD) and the Peruvian government has created a world class museum.  (There is also an older, dusty one that I rather liked, too.)

One of the interesting things about the Tombes Real is that you enter from above, and experience the 12 royal tomb artifacts and recreations in the order that they were discovered by archeologists.  The void created by the section emptied by looters has been partially filled.  Apparently archeologist Walter Alva was tipped off to the existence of the tomb by a sudden flood of high quality gold objects on the black market.

Quite a number of the items were recovered, and there is a great photo of Walter inspecting the loot at the Miami airport with the proud customs agents.  We later took a bus out to the real Sipán site and experienced the enormity of the place.  Between the looters and El Niños it is a bit worse for wear on the outside, but still a fascinating visit.

We also followed our guidebook to the rustic Rancho Santana about an hour out of town where we spent a day on horseback.  We rode in a desert forrest and stopped at two small archeological sites.  It was good to get off the more beaten tourist path and have a chance to talk briefly with some of the local guys doing archeological work.  The ranch is run by a Swiss woman, Andrea, and her camera shy husband Miguel.  While we were there there were two young German girls working as volunteers to help with the horses.  There are many volunteer programs in Peru.  It seems it is still possible to travel cheaply and safely as a young person and have great experiences doing something useful.

During our beach stay at Chicama (see Thanksgiving post), we had a great hike across dunes, desert mountains and beach, followed by Thanksgiving dinner provided in part by Brian the Burrito Guy from California and a bottle of the preferred wine of Peru:  semi-dry (read really-sweet) red wine.

In Huanchaco (near the city of Trujillo) we stayed near the beach at the Huanchaco RV Gardens.  We were there 4 nights and enjoyed the company of 3 different french-speaking couples (well, Jean Michel's wife was back in France with her mother, but she was there in spirit).

The daytime highlight was a day we spent with taxi-driver Herbert visiting several different ruins with Monique and André from Belgium (check out their blog - great photos - www.ushulaska.be).  By far the most interesting for us was our first stop, the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna (Huaca being the word for the truncated pyramid shape) where the Moche people lived in 1 - 500 AD (same group as in the desert forrest).  The sun temple was once the largest manmade structure in the western hemisphere at 45 meters high.  It was looted by the spaniards, and worn away by El Niños, but it is still an impressive site.  It is not open now, but you can see it from the moon pyramid that is visitable with a guide.  This moon huaca has 12 levels, of which you can see parts of four on the inside.  The outside is pyramid shaped, and the inside is an inverted pyramid.  Every hundred years or so, after the rooms in the current level had filled up with dead Moche royals and priests, all the open areas would be stacked with adobe bricks, leveled off, and a new story begun.

We also visited Chan Chan, a huge site of the Chimú people (they surrendered to the Incas in 1477) near the ocean in Trujillo.  The walls are 12 meters high and the site spans 28 sq kms.  Most of it was store houses, but there are several spectacular plazas, some with amazing acoustics - we heard a tiny woman sing a song/chant that completely filled the place - and a huge reflecting pool for moon worship. Like a number of other cultures from this area (including the Incas) the Chimú valued cloth over pottery (Luc would probably agree about the low relative value of pottery).  As a result, many of the carvings seem very two dimensional, as though they are cartoon characters created from an early computer game or someone's alpaca sweater pattern.  It is interesting to me that textiles, woven by women, were the highest valued product of these cultures.  There was also metalwork, but the goal was not strength for weapons, as in Europe, but for brilliance and flexibility to create religious adornments.  Gold was thought to be the sweat of the sun and silver the tears of the moon.  The Incas handed over plenty of gold and silver to the spaniards, but burned all their cloth so it wouldn't be confiscated.

The evening highlight in the RV garden was the amazing fresh-from-the-market fish dinners we shared with our friends.  In Huanchaco they still use these caballitos de tortora boats for fishing.

We are continuing our thread down the coast, today we vistited Sechín, near the town of Casma.  This one is from 1600 BC.  You can walk around the 12 foot outside walls and huge walls of carvings of a gruesome battle with the victors holding clubs and the vanquished with their guts spilling out.

Tonight we are parked outside the Casa del Arquéologo at the site of Carál.  This is the oldest (known) city in South America, dating from 2600 BC.  Though we are next to the ocean we are surrounded by desert.  However, the people of this valley are able to coax sugar cane, rice, corn, tomatoes, red peppers, potatoes, mangos and many other fruits and vegetables I could not identify out of the soil.

Dervla Murphy, in her book Eight Feet in the Andes, does a great job of weaving together the story of the Incas, whose trail they are following, and her own adventures.  She retells the famous story, for example, of Francisco Pizarro and his 168 Spanish soldiers who captured the Inca leader Atahualpa in Cajamarca on November 15, 1532 and defeated his 4,000 soldiers.  The following July, after collecting a ransom of 11 tons of gold and 26,000 pounds of silver, Pizarro unexpectedly executed Atahualpa.  Charles V, the Spanish Emperor (who did not hesitate to finance his empire building with ransomed and looted Incan precious metals) viewed Atahualpa as a fellow monarch, and was much displeased.

Most historians attribute the defeat of the Incas to superior weapons and horses, but Charles Mann (1491) contends that the most effective weapon the Europeans brought with them was smallpox, which had already killed Atahualpa's father, brother, sister-wife, and many of the Incas before the Pizarro brothers arrived in Peru.

What I love about Murphy's writing is that she is perceptive and opinionated.  Her book, Full Tilt, about riding from England to India on a bicycle is one of my favorites.  I would save 8 Feet until you are in the Andes.

Here is Dervla's entry from December 2, 1984 (which I read on the same date) as she, daughter Rachel,  and mule (together, the 8 feet) walked in the Andes.

Camp in the high puna, 2 December
Rachel never once complained but perhaps she was mentally composing a letter to the NSPCC about being expected to walk twenty-two miles on half a tin of sardines at 13,700 feet a week short of her 10th birthday.

She later writes, "we miss a lot, in the pampered West, by never knowing real hunger.  Rachel said that now she knows how a large percentage of the world's population feels all the time."

On our trip, we are certainly not experiencing the privations of the Murphys after they had run out of cash and encountered a political demonstration that closed the banks at the only place she could have cashed a travelers check.  Even Murphy realized their situation was both self imposed and of short duration. "The certainty of plenty and comfort lies before us and we can not even begin to imagine what it feels like to go hungry and cold for a lifetime."

Luc and I do often wonder aloud at how much simpler our life is, and at the same time the incredible luxury we travel in in relation to most of the people we see.  Our little van is vastly more commodious than some of the meager shacks we see that house multigenerational families and their family business.