Huanchaco

We spent an extremely comfortable night in the luxury bus from Lima to Huanchaco and arrived there in the early morning. We immediatly found a nice familiar hostel where they gave us the family room for 15 soles per person. Huanchaco at this time of the year was very quiet. not a lot of tourists were around because the water is quite cold at the moment but for our purpose it was just perfect. We slept a lot, ate read and didn't do much at all.

After a few days our friend Mel arrived and together we visited some of the ruins of ancient civilizations around Trujillo. One day we went to the Moche temple called Huaca de la luna which is one of the oldest in the whole country. The temple was build on top of an older temple which sat on top of an even older one. All together the huaca contains 5 diferent temples stacked up on each other. As the spaces were filed out with clay when a new temple was build, the old ones are very well preserved, even the paintings on the walls still contain some colour. After about 2000 years. That was quite impressive.

Another day we went to Chan-Chan, a gigantic city of 14 km² where the people lived after the moche empire broke down for unknown reasons. This place has been rebuild, unlike the Moche temple where only preservation work has been done. The rebuilding of the walls gives it a kind of artifical tourist attraction flavour but nonetheless the sheer size of the place makes it an impressive exprience to visit.

On our trips to the temples we came along one of the oldest breeds of dogs in this country: the peruvian dog. They have no fur and blck skin with only some single thick hair like pigs. They are incredibly ugly but apparently there is a law that every temple has to have some of these dogs, to keep traditions up. Anyways, some of them were wuite friendly some we played with them.

After relaxing for a week, only interrrupted by the obligatory stomach bug, we took a 17 hours bus to Tarapoto where we only spend one night and on the next day we had our first domestic flight to Iquitos. The flight took us only 40 minutes while the only other way to go there (the boat) would have taken us 3 days. But as a boat is considerably cheaper, this will be our method of transport in the next weeks when we travel from Iquitos to the border with Brazil and then onwards to Manaus and finally Belem.