We decided to travel cheaply today and take local transportation to the different sites we were going to visit. This turned out to be very easy and lots of fun because we were the only gringos on all the combis and buses and everyone was very friendly to us and helped us get off at the right spots. The buses and combis went down the street right in front of our hostel, so after we ate a delicious breakfast at “My Friend” a block away (the best breakfasts we have had for the price) we just hopped on a bus and asked to be let off in front of Chan Chan, which is halfway between Huanchaco and Trujillo. Chan Chan is the remains of the largest adobe city in the world and it was the capital of the Chimu civilization. The area used to encompass 20 square kilometres, but due to development in the area there is only 14 square kilometres remaining. It is amazing that the structures have survived so long – since around 1500 AD when the Incas came and took over. The city of Chan Chan was built in 1300 A.D., and inside the city each of the Chimu kings had their own temple constructed and when the king died they closed up the temple and built another one for the new king. There are nine such temples in this area but only one (Tschudi) has been restored and is shown to tourists. We hired a guide to take us around because we find we get more out of an archaeological site if we have someone there to explain it all to us. The Chimu people lived close to the ocean and therefore were a sea-faring people with the ocean being the most important thing to them; this is much different from the tribes in the mountains that we have seen up until now. The temple is filled with images of fish, pelicans, fishing nets and sea otters (now extinct in this area). Only 30% of the temple is original and 70% is restored, but they picked this temple to restore because it was in the best condition. It is amazing that this city has even survived at all, considering it is made of mud and grass, but the climate here gets very little rain which has helped to preserve the buildings (our guide said that the last time he remembered it raining was when he was a child, and he was in his forties). The main plaza of Tschudi is quite large, and all the surrounding walls have images of sea otters running along the bottom and edges of the walls and horizontal lines above the otters that represent the waves of the ocean. The far end of the plaza has two wooden guards with stone faces (reproductions – the originals are in the Chan Chan museum). Wandering around the rest of the temple we were impressed with how big it was and how intricate some of the designs were. We tried to imagine what it looked like when the walls were higher – the outer walls were 12 metres high, and the inner walls were either 8m, 5m, or 3m high, depending on what they were for. Many of the interior walls were made to look like fish nets, with holes in them to allow for air flow because of the intense heat of the summer. One end of the temple had a fairly large pond, made from underground springs. The tomb of the king had been excavated and they found with him his 90 wives, about 20 guards, a couple of children, and the usual animal sacrifices as well. Those people must not have been very happy when the king died, knowing that they would have to die as well so they could join him on his journey through the afterlife.
After visiting the archaeological site, we walked to the museum which was a couple of kilometres away. The museum was well done and had a lot of interesting artefacts and information on the Chimu culture. They had a really good exhibit that included an automatic audio-video display and a huge small-scale 3-D map of the area around Trujillo; each place they talked about on the map would light up in turn. We had to wait for a while for someone to turn it on for us, but it was worth the wait.
We went into downtown Trujillo after visiting the museum so we could walk around the centre for a while and have lunch. I had visited Trujillo a couple of times as a child, but I didn’t remember any of it. We walked around the Plaza de Armas, which has some nice colonial buildings around it, all painted in different colours. We ate lunch at a nice little café that was full of locals. It was getting late and we still wanted to visit the Huacas de la Luna and Sol, which closed at 4pm, so we took a taxi out to the site. We managed to get on the last English tour of the day, which we had to ourselves. Only the Huaca de la Luna is being excavated at the moment and has tours around it; there is no money to excavate Huaca del Sol yet, which is very sad because the Sun Temple is much bigger and probably has lots of cool stuff inside it (it is Peru’s larges pre-Columbian structure).
These temples of the Sun and Moon were built by the Moche civilization, who came before the Chimu (0 – 600 B.C.). The Moche built these temples in the shape of pyramids, similar to the ones of the Aztec (stepped), and had a habit of every 100 years or so covering up the existing pyramid with bricks and building a new one on top of the old one. The good thing about this is that their technique has done a wonderful job of preserving the inner temples, but the bad thing is that it is very difficult to get down into the inner temples without destroying the outer ones. The archaeologists working on the temple of the Moon are doing a great job so far, and save for a few ramps and retaining walls built for the tourists, the entire site is still in its original state. It was amazing to see all the friezes on the walls in full colour, even though they were over 1500 years old. Most of the images were of the god that they worshiped, Ai Apaec, as well as some snakes, birds and felines. The temple is believed to have six layers (they haven’t gotten all the way to the bottom layers yet), and we saw images on three different layers (3rd, 4th, and 5th layers – the 6th and outer layer has been destroyed by looters and weather). In one section you can see images from three different layers at once. The archaeologists are continuously making new discoveries on a regular basis, and we were lucky to see their latest big find from last October – a wall with very elaborate, colourful images depicting the daily life of the Moche. It was very cool. Lincoln and I decided that after Machu Picchu, this was our favourite archaeological site that we have seen on our trip.
Our tour didn’t finish until almost 5:00, an hour after the site closed, so we didn’t think any more combis were going to come and get us. We started walking to the main road and luckily a combi came by. He let us off in Trujillo and told us to cross the street to catch another combi to Huanchacho. There was a nice man on the corner who was also going to Huanchaco, so he waved down the right combi for us. We had been hoping to make it back to the beach for the sunset, which looked like a good one, but we missed it by about ten minutes. The light was still nice, so we walked along the beach and took a few pictures. After looked around at some other restaurants, we decided to go back to Kero for dinner again because it was so yummy last night. After such a busy day we went to bed early. (Who are we kidding; we go to bed early every day!)