Trujillo

We enjoyed our stay in Trujillo as we got on well with our hosts and saw some interesting things at a relaxed pace.  Our hosts turned out to be really into chess and this made J very happy as she enjoyed endless tournaments.  Between all the chess and some nice evenings with local beer and food, we explored Trujillo.  The city is surrounded by desert and the stuffy dry heat never leaves and even in the city centre, there are cracks where the desert pokes through.  There are numerous historical sites in and around the city, we first visited the city of Chan Chan, capital of Chimu culture until conquered by the Inca half a century before the Conquest and largest adobe (sun-baked mud bricks) city in the world.

This is part of a palace complex.  For being made of mud, it is a very impressive and beautiful site, though much of the surrounding city is now little more than unusual tumours in the desert outside.  Hanging around we met one of these guys;

It's a Peruvian Hairless Dog, a type which existed here alongside many Pre-Colombian peoples for many centuries.  We would later discover that the governement decided to keep several of them at many different Pre-Colombian sities, as a sort of living piece of pre-conquest culture we suppose.  They certainly seemed happy enough bumbling around the various pyramids we saw.

As well as Chan Chan we also went to a pyramid which has now been surrounded by modern Trujillo.  It's only a single building but we had it to ourselves and enjoyed the elaborate reliefs, the compulsory hairless dogs and also saw a burrowing owl flitting about.

The next day J got her hit of horses when she went to see a display by some Peruvian Paso dressage riders.  There were also dancers and sometimes the two were combined;

We returned to historical sites at Huaca Moche, a holy site from the culture that preceded the Chimu of Chan Chan.  We were lucky enough to get a great guide and he took us through not only the history, but the current archaeological projects at the still working site;

The site is often referred to the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon.  However, our guide was explaining to us that the deity represented had nothing to do with either of those and the names date from white people in the 19th century who had been to Mexico and decided to label any indigenous site larger than a house "of the Sun or Moon".  We had encountered this problem in Teotihuacan (as anyone who's followed us that long might recall).

We also experienced a bit of a cooking fail, when we got some of the purple corn and tried to make corn-on-the-cob with them.  After half an hour of boiling, the corn was no softer and our host realized what we were doing.  This kind of corn is only for making chicha morada with, she explained.  People don't eat it.  The tasty chicha morada nearly made up for our embarrassment.

Yesterday we set off for Lima, expecting it to take a couple of days.  Once again, we underestimated Peru and arrived in Lima late last night with a friendly trucker (who also bought us dinner).  We are hoping to Couchsurf most of our stay here, but are currently in a hostel in the city centre.  Today we've explored parks and big colonial buildings and got some shopping and important errands done: