The Amazon

Trujillo is a town with lots of pretty buildings painted in bright colours, it is an attractive city but the grey skies that have been following me up the coast persist and make it a not so nice place to be. I came to town to see the Huaca pyramids and the pre-Inca ruins at Chan chan.
The Huaca pyramids are in the middle of a complex which like Tiahuanaco in Bolivia is barely at the start of it's excavation and reconstruction process. The larger of the two temples, the temple of the sun is filled with adobe bricks as every time a flood, earthquake or other natural disaster happened the people would simply fill in the old temple and build a new one on top. The second pyramid, the pyramid of the moon appears to be five temples built atop one another, it is in the middle of it's excavation process and as they remove more or the adobe bricks from within, it reveals more and more of the original painted surfaces beneath.
The fanged faces one can only conclude were painted as protecting spirits, they have uncovered the sacred rock where the high priestess made her human sacrifices, the cup of blood was then taken to the area where the God needed to be appeased and poured on the ground there by the high priest.
After that I went to another bunch of ruins called Chan chan which was a community, ruins here are dusty, dirty and run down before they have had a chance to be dug up, Peru is somewhat of an anticlimax on the whole wow factor.

Then I headed to a town called Chiclayo where the ruins of various tombs have been found, most famously those of the lords of Sipan. The tombs were found mostly in tact with vast amounts of gold and silver ornamentation, the gold and turquoise earrings are pretty impressive, there is also a lot of very creepy ornaments and some odd nose rings which are kind of mouth protectors of some sort. They say in another 400 years they may have unearthed all the tombs in this area, amazing but true, why the hills around here are not heaving with grave robbers I have no idea, maybe in another 100 years the place will be worth visiting.
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Then it was another overnight bus from hell to get to Chachapoyas, The first day we trekked to Karija to see the sarcophagus, kind of cool but small, we also saw a rather groovy cave, "Caverna De Quiocta", stalagtites and mites many looked like melting faces or foetal position skeletons with the limestone columns dripping like candle wax oveer them, one exceptionally creepy one looked like a melting marshmellow baby. considering the place used to be used by the Chachapoyas as a cemetary adds to it's creep factor.
The next day I finally made it to Kuelap the reason I had come all the way to Chachapoyas, it is really cool, it is a large fortress built by the "cloud people" on top of a hill, if someone died during construction they just added their bones (bodies)to the construction process, the bones can be seen inside of the walls, it was seen as a kind of sacrifice to the gods. They had fridge's for food storage and a sacred circular temple (their houses were also circular) inside was a bottle shape originally used by the Chachapoyans as a sun dial so they knew the seasons, the harvest time, the fiesta time, the solstice, the equinox etc. Then by the Incas (after they conqured the site) to drop sacrifices to the sun god inside and finally by the Spanish (when they conquered) as a prison. The scenary on the way up to the heighs of Kurlap through terraced agricultural lands and smattered with tiny villages is stunning, the clouds wraith like wrapping there fingers around the hillsides all add to the atmosphere, the first really awesome ruins I've seen since I've been here.

Tarapoto was a nothing town that we really only saw the bus station on arrival and the collectivo station on departure the next day, we stayed at a very classy hotel opposite the bus station, when the clerk showed us our room he kindly surfed off the porn channel when showing us how the t.v. worked! Oh yeah all class here.
and on to Yurimaguas where again we stayed long enough to eat lunch, (cerviche again, too lemony for my tastes again) and the got ourselves on board a boat to Iquitos.
Three days up the Amazon on the boat was nice, I slept in a hammock on deck and with all the other passengers, it was fun. The food was average (bring your own dish and cutlery) I saw dolphins up and down the river and flocks of birds, all very beautiful but large panoramas of this sort are impossible to photograph with any sort of justice to the beauty of the actual scenary. It's at last hot, though very humid with lots of rainstorms, it makes for beautiful Amazon rainbows. (I just love using the word Amazon as a sort of prefix). There are a zillion little huts along the edge of the river made from sticks with thatched roofs, very cute. The boat pulled in regularly at little towns, whereupon they were flooded with people selling fruit and frozen jellies in plastic bags.
Iquitos is full of very well heeled tourists, who fly in and out to do expensive Amazon tours. There are buildings and bandstands designed by Eiffel and very strange looking crumbling tiled buildings.

Our first attempt to get to Belen (an area of Iquitos the largest city in the world accessible only by air or river) was a complete disaster, we tumbled from our guest house all pink and freshly scrubbed, jumped on the bus that said Belen and ended up at the warfs at the opposite end of town, (the driver took us back to Belen for free). We wandered around the market looking for the local wharfs, and a policeman came and stopped us with the chilling words "come to the station, we want to talk to you", and muttering further something about how the boss would "Explain things to us." hmmmmm, having heard about how dodgy the police in south America are we declined to enter the station and scampered quickly in the opposite direction. We then caught a taxi to the "wharfs" The guy dropped us at this dodgy looking rubbish filled alley way, the three girls of the party looked at each other and I heard Dr Seuss in my head "You wont go down any not so good street." Yes I thought to myself, that's a not so good street if ever I saw one. So we walked back to town.
The next morning we had Bec and I had upped our bloke ratio and lowered our chick ratio and we tried again. This was a much more successful attempt, as we wandered around the market a helpful chap volunteered to be our guide, we hoped in a boat and cruised around the floating markets and houses on stilts of Belen, it's quite dry here at the moment and the dirt and grub factor is high, I would say if you have seen the floating markets and houses on stilts in Laos, forget it here.
Our guide took us on to the butterfly sanctuary, I wanted to see some of the guys responsible for the tornados and rainstorms in the rest of the world. Again unimpressive, if you have seen butterfly sanctuaries in Australia or Asia don't come to this one for the butterflies! Do come for the other attractions though, the owner has taken to adopting wildlife confiscated by border police at the airport here and illegal animal traders etc. As soon as we got to the sanctuary more or less a white painted Capuchin monkey decided he liked me and jumped on my shoulder, the feeling was not really mutual and he eventually left me alone! Then there were bright red faced monkeys running up and down and chattering their teeth at us, a Jaguar (called Pedro something) who is gorgeous, a Tapir called Lewis, a manatae a couple of very loud silky howler monkeys, several macaws and the highlight two sloths one of who is a three month old baby (rescued from smugglers at the airport) She is gorgeous and I got to hold her, unfortunately I didn't get a photo as the room was dark but sloth have seriously moved up my favourite animal chart, so cute, such long padded feet with loooong claws at the bottom. Anyway.


Tomorrow I start a five day boat trip up the Amazon, expect radio silence!