Month: September 2016

Last night at nine we caught an overnight bus to Chachapoyas. There was a stewardess welcoming us onto the bus. After we left she served tea and box dinners of chicken and rice.  Our seats were on the top level. The bus was full but the seats reclined to 140 degrees so they were pretty comfortable. I slept, listened to music on my phone, read, and woke up periodically to look out the window. There were a lot of trucks on the windy road. This morning we woke up in the mountains. 

Chachapoyas is at 7600 ft and we started at sea level so we were going up all night. We arrived at Chachapoyasat about 7:30 got our bags and walked to our hotel. The roads were muddy so we might have been wiser to get a cab even though it was only about eight blocks. 

The Hotel let us have a room immediately and after settling in we went out to find coffee. While we were sitting on a bench in the park a nice looking young man sat on the branch across from us. You could tell he wanted to practice his English. He was sixteen. He said he wants  to visit the United States and he loves English. He was in Chachapoyas to take a math exam. If he did well he will be able to go to Lima for school next year. 

We made plans for tomorrow. We went to the collectivo (van) station to figure our how we could get  to the ruins at  Kuélap tomorrow.  It sounds like we can get a van at 2 in the afternoon. We will spend the night in a guest house near the ruins. I’m guessing we won’t have Internet. 

We also explored Chachapoyas. We bought some bread. The vegetables in the market were beautiful and I found a great yarn store. 

Our hotel is beautiful and our room is impeccably clean but it is cold. The  weather is overcast and rainy. When we are walking around it is warm enough but our room is like a cave and it is cold! We napped and read all afternoon snuggled together to stay warm. 

We had dinner at a great restaurant Duke found on Trip Advisor. We talked to a lady from Switzerland who is on an extended trip through Peru exploring on her own. In the picture below you can see Duke’s beef hanging from a little clothesline. We had great soup and as an appetizer a plantain cooked with peanuts and cheese.  They also gave us complementary test tube drinks. While we ate we watched a kitten dart from place to place as she surveyed her territory. 

Thursday morning we went hat shopping. When Duke was in this area in 1979 he bought a straw hat that was so durable he could roll it up then open it later and it would pop right back into shape. He had the hat for years. We found a new hat in a little shop not far from the hotel. 

After checking out of our hotel at noon and storing our bags in the hotel luggage room they called us a taxi.  The taxi driver took us to a nearby town to see the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán. In 1987 an archaeological exploration found three undisturbed tombs near the town of Sipán. They are attributed to the Moche culture and are dated to about 300 AD. 

I saw the Tutankhamen exhibition in San Francisco many years ago and the gold work, ceramics, bead work and exhibits. here were even better! The tombs were found in a giant Adobe pyramid and the museum is shaped like a pyramid. No cameras were allowed in the museum. The museum has exhibits of the artifacts found in the tombs. It is all original. It was fascinating because everything was displayed with big pictures of what it looked like in place as it was excavated. 

 Some of the highlights were a gold ceremonial necklace with about 12 finely worked gold spiders in there webs, an intricate gold statues of the King with a slave and beautiful ceramic pots and dishes. A lot of the gold had inlays of brilliant blue turquoise. There were big collars made of thousands of tiny beads. How the archaeologists removed it all and cleaned and preserved it is hard to imagine.  There was so much gold and silver and so many beautiful pieces. 

After getting back from the museum we went to a movie. It was a Peruvian romantic comedy La Peor de mis Bodas. I really didn’t need to understand all the Spanish to be entertained and to laugh at the jokes. It was fun and very relaxing. 

Our bus to Chachapoyas left at 9 pm so we had pizza and went to the bus station. 

Today we caught a 10 am bus from Piura to Chiclayo. Our drive was through barren desert. According to Wikipedia the Sechura desert is “one of the most arid on Earth”.

Our bus for this three hour trip was pretty cool.  It was double decker and we were in front on the top deck. The air conditioning worked so it was a pretty comfortable ride. 

Chiclayo is closer to the ocean than Piura was. I assume that is why the temperature and humidity here are pretty comfortable. Piura was unbearably hot and humid. 

On the ride I finished listening to season one and the updates of the podcast Serial. I think I am really late to talking about this podcast. Everyone else has already listened to it. I found it fascinating. I still can’t decide if I think he did it or not. If you haven’t listened to it I recommend it. 

This afternoon I also finished my third book of the trip. Book two was a nonfiction book – There’s a Fish in my Ear – about translation. It was interesting but a bit long winded.  The book I finished today was Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would say it is of the same caliber of another light entertaining book I really enjoyed, The Rosie Project. 

After getting to Chiclayo, as we do in every new town,  we walked around a bit. 

Tomorrow we don’t leave Chiclayo until 7 pm. We will be catching an all night bus to Chachapoyas. We still don’t have a plan for what to do during the day tomorrow. 

This morning we caught a 7 am bus leaving Loja. Since we were leaving too early to eat the hotel breakfast that they packed a breakfast for us!

It took us about 5 hours to get to the Peruvian border.  The crossing was pretty easy except that the Peruvian entrance agent didn’t think Duke looked like his picture and she questioned him about why his Spanish was so good? Was he sure he didn’t live in Ecuador?

We had descend to 1900  ft altitude at the border. It was very hot and humid and the bus didn’t have air conditioning. From the border we continued down to sea level where the temperature was 97 and the humidity felt like 100%. The terrain was totally different than the places we have visited in Ecuador. It was all sandy desert. 

We finally got to Piura. The trip took about 8 hours and I listened to and was thoroughly engaged by 8 episodes of season one of the podcast  Serial. 

In Piura while I waited in the bus station Duke went to get some Peruvian money (soles) so we could get a taxi to our hotel. We are staying at the Costa Del Sol Wyndham. Once we got into our air conditioned room we were able to relax a bit. 

By the time we went out to explore the temperature had dropped quite a bit. We are only about fifty miles from a cold ocean. We walked around town and explored some. We will be here two nights.