From Peru to Ecuador
Legal notice: our mothers should not read this one.
We left the town of Chachapoyas to head north to our next destination on our trip, Ecuador. We did not want to take the night buses all the way back to the coast, and opted instead for the mountain route directly to Vilcabamba over the remote river crossing at Las Balsas. The trip started innocuously enough, with an overnight stop in the Peruvian town of San Ignacio and a couple of rides in over-packed collectivo taxis (did you know that the Toyota Corolla is an 8 passenger vehicle?). Things even went really well at the border crossing; it was one of the few that we have had without any issues. We made our way to Zumba in a truck with remarkably uncomfortable wooden benches in the bed and got there just in time to catch the a bus to our first stop in Ecuador, Vilcabamba.
The Ruins of Kuelap
Well, this is it. We finally visited the last Old Piles of Stones that we have scheduled for this trip. From the coastal city of Chiclayo we headed back up into the highlands to the mountain town of Chachapoyas, our jumping off point for the site that is beginning to rival the South's Machu Picchu amongst travelers in the know: the mountain-top fortress of Kuelap.
The Museum of the Royal Tombs of Sican
In our next day in Chiclayo, we decided to head to another museum to take a gander at the finds from the tomb of the Lord of Sican. The museum is rather enigmatically located in the dusty little town of Ferrenafe, 17 km to the north of Chiclayo but nowhere near the site of Sican. The Sican culture, also known as the Lambayeque culture, flourished in the area after the Huari warriors from the sierras crushed and destroyed the Mochica empire around the 8th century. They are thought to represent a fusion of the Huari conquerors and the surviving Moche and were among the most prolific goldsmiths on the continent until they were in turn conquered by and absorbed into the rising Chimu at some point in the 11th century.
The Ruins of Sipan
After having been to the Lord of Sipan's museum in Lambayeque, we wanted to head south of Chiclayo to the place where it had all happened: the actual historical city of Sipan. Of course, there is not a lot left of Sipan, which was, for a time, one of the principal capitals of the Mochica culture. It was built of adobe and, as we have noted in the past, adobe does not withstand the test of time very well. But then, having spent a lot of time sleeping in adobe buildings over the last year, we must admit that we think that they do not withstand the test of anything very well.
The Museums of Lambayeque
After satisfying our curiosity of the Trujillo region, we moved on to the somewhat more northern coastal city of Chiclayo to explore some other fine Precolumbian places. Unfortunately, the regional administrators of tourism for the area have taken the frustrating decision to decentralize the departmental attractions as much as possible in order to spread the tourism wealth. The result of this decision has been to place museums in the most improbable places imaginable, geographically dispersed, far from the archaeological sites themselves and without any apparent systemization making it almost impossible to visit them all without booking an inevitably inadequate tour out of Chiclayo. Since we have resolved to avoid tours as much as possible for the rest of the trip, we decided to skin this cat one leg at a time (while leaving the parts of it that you can't get to easily in public transport unskinned, unfortunately), starting with the two museums in the town of Lambayeque, around 15 km north of Chiclayo.
The Ruins of Chan Chan
The day after our unexpected but pleasant discovery south of Trujillo, we headed north to the much better known ancient city of Chan Chan. At its height in the late 14th century CE, Chan Chan was reputedly the largest city in the Americas and it is supposedly still the largest adobe city ever built. After about a year of seeing and hearing contradictory superlatives about such places, we have our doubts. Nevertheless, Chan Chan, built by the Chimu as their capital city as they rose to build an empire unmatched in South America until the budding Incas conquered them, is a huge place and impressive to visit. Chan Chan survived as a bustling metropolis under the Inca, and it was not until the plundering Spanish arrived that the wealthy coastal city was sacked, depopulated and finally abandoned to the sea winds.
The Ruins of the City Moche
Just south of Trujillo at the end of a dusty road lays one of the most unexpected ancient treasures of Peru: the first capital of the Mochica empire. This remarkable city, quite large for its day, once housed some 20,000 inhabitants (high estimate) who lived in a city defined by two large pyramids. Despite the huge size of the pyramids, one of which is the largest single pre-columbian structure in South America, the city is a relatively new discovery. For many years, the pyramids passed as minor, isolated structures. They are popularly known as the Huaca del Sol (Temple of the Sun) and the Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon), appellations which are based on erroneous correlations drawn by early anthropologists between these structures and the pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico.
Trujillo
After our visit to Chavin de Huantar, we headed back down to the coast to the colonial city of Trujillo after a brief overnight stop in Huaraz. The main draw for us was, of course, the archaeological sites in the surroundings, but Trujillo itself is quite beautiful and so we snapped some nice shots of it.
The Museum of Chavin de Huantar
Across the town of Chavin de Huantar, about a mile and a half from the ruins, is the brand new museum dedicated to the culture. It is definitely worth a side trip, as many of the most important monuments found at the site are now here. This includes 16 of the stone heads that once adorned the principal temple and a great many panels carved with various members of the Chavin pantheon.
Chavin de Huantar
After resolving our dispute we headed up to the place that drew us into the Huaraz region to start with: the ruins of Chavin de Huantar. Chavin is the center of one of Peru's most ancient and best studied cultures and flourished from the 10th to the 3rd centuries BCE. For over 60 years, before the discovery of Caral and its antiquity, anthropologists thought that Chavin represented the birth of civilization on the continent. While this turned out to be false, Chavin still occupies an important place in the development of the Andean culture.
Caraz
Our stay in Huaraz while we were resolving our complaint included a Sunday when all of the government offices were closed. We used the day to head up into the mountains a bit to the town of Caraz. Caraz has a reputation as a great place to base yourself for hikes into the Andes, but we did not have the time to do this. We did, however, get to take a nice day hike out from the town into its immediate surroundings.
Huaraz
Our next stop after Barranca was the mountain city of Huaraz, known mostly for its beautiful mountain setting and its proximity to the ruins of Chavin de Huantar, which we will speak about in a later post. Our plan on arriving in Huaraz was to book a guide and take a three-day hike from the town to the ruins, but unfortunately the tour agency tried to scam us (inadequate equipment, drunk guide, unannounced schedule changes, etc.), so we spent the three days bouncing between the police, the consumer protection agency and the courthouse instead.
The Ruins of Caral
For a couple of archeology geeks like us, today was a special day. After about a month of bouncing from one Old Pile of Stone to another, we arrived in the Supe valley, where the Oldest Piles of Stones in the Americas reside. The people of the Supe valley were true pioneers: they were one of the only two peoples in the world to actually invent government (the other being the Sumatrans), and their home is one of just six cradles of civilization in the world.
The Ruins of Paramonga
After finally leaving Lima with our documents replaced and ready to move on, we headed a few hours north to the small town of Barranca. Our ultimate goal there was to head to the ruins of Caral, but our first stop was to the somewhat more diminutive ruins of Paramonga. This complex, a short taxi ride north of Barranca, was a temple and fortress complex built by the Chimu culture in the 13th or 14th centuries, and then re-appropriated by the Inca in the late 15th century.
The Ruins of Pachacamac
Our last little excursion from Lima was to the sprawling ruins of Pachacamac, 30 kilometers south of the city overlooking the Pacific ocean. This temple complex was once the most important religious center in the entire Andean region. Likely founded around 200 CE, the site served as a major center for a long string of civilizations, from the Nieveria, the Lima, the Wari, the Ichme to the Inca. Each of these peoples renovated and expanded the site, making it patchwork of styles and techniques.
Museo Banco Central de Reserva del Peru
The finest museum in Lima is, probably, the one located in the former building of the country's central bank. It has four sections, all of which are worth a look. The biggest is the collections of Precolumbian pottery, gold, and textiles (yes, another one, but this one is really good). The second section is dedicated to what they call popular art, which is not the Andy-Warhol type stuff but rather works collected from various cities and villages to celebrate local traditions. On the upper level is an expose of Peruvian fine art (or "academic art", as they call it) since independence, which traces the major currents in the genre. Finally, a small collection of coinage displays examples of the major currencies used in Peru since the conquista.
The Ruins of Huaca Pucllana
While we mentioned a few days ago that we did not really see the attraction of the ritzy Miraflores suburb, we should mention that it does have one redeeming quality: an Old Pile of Stones! Ok, well technically, the Huaca Pucllana is an old pile of mud, but it still counts. The 6 hectare site consists of a large adobe pyramid and part of the city that once surrounded it, although around 70% of the site, including 5 smaller pyramids, was bull-dozed 30 years ago to make way for luxury apartments.
El Museo de la Nacion
Lima's Museo de la Nacion, run by a local university, is reputed to be the country's best. Unfortunately, at the current time, it is still light-years behind Cusco's Prehispanic Art Museum or Lima's own Museo Banco Central de Reserva del Peru. It seems that this situation may soon change: work is going on to remodel it in the style of Mexico's unparalleled Anthropology Museum, but for the time being it simply follows the pattern set by pretty much every Peruvian museum (some pottery, some gold, some colonial era religious art, some republican era paintings, and some local handicrafts), but it lacks organization or much in the way of pedagogic explanations. Most horrifically, the museum's most famous pieces (including the weaving of the Paracas culture) are not on public display during the renovations.
Welcome to Lima
We finally arrived at the half-way point of our journey through Peru, the country's seaside capital, Lima. The city is probably the craziest place we have been yet on this trip in many ways: the city is crowded, bustling, gray and gritty. The absence of any urban planning in this city of 10 to 14 million people (depending on how you count) has made it a transportation nightmare with gridlocked streets and the sound of horns all the time, while sprawling mud-brick slums line the roads approaching the center for miles and miles. At this time of year, a coastal fog shrouds the whole area in gray, making it all the more depressing.
The Ruins of Huari
The only day trip that we managed to take from Ayacucho was to the Ruins of Huari (aka, Wari), some 30km outside of town in the middle of a cactus forest. Those of you who have been reading this regularly should recognize the name: Huari was the seat of one of the two major pre-Inca Andean empires, the other being Tiwanaku in Bolivia. When the Huari state surged around the 7th century AD, it managed to conquer most of what is today Peru, excepting the Amazon basin and some of the southern coast. The experience was traumatic for many of the peoples involved (including the flourishing Nasca and Mochica), many of whom lost their independent identity entirely.