Chachapoyas


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December 15th 2010
Published: December 15th 2010
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Chachapoyas, Kuelap, and farewell to Peru



Chachapoyas is a lovely town that sits quietly in the jungle in Peru's central north and rarely gets visited by tourists because there isn't really anything else within about a ten hour bus ride in any direction. The streets and main plaza are lined with white houses with dark brown wooden balconies and doors, and cafes, shops, and resteraunts are all concentrated within easy walking distance around the Plaza de Armas. I spent the first day sleeping off the bus trip in a really nice hostel with probably the most enthusiastic shower i've encountered so far, and drinking coffee and eating yukas fritas in cafes (Yukkas are a root vegetable that i encountered in boiled form on the Machu Piccu trek. Kind of like a potato but more fibrous and almost inedibly bland on it's own, but delicous fried. They serve it with a big cube of local cheese and face-meltingly hot sauce). Fun preoccupations while sitting in cafes included watching the multiple little stalls in the plaza simultaneously throwing tarpaulins over their goods and running for cover everytime the rain randomly exploded forth, and speculating as to what the tiny, specked boiled eggs that they sell in massive amounts from street stalls were (we settled on quail after much arguing, but i never saw any quails. That all i'm saying).

The next day i left with a tour early in the morning to visit Kuelap fortress. Kuelap is a gigantic fortress (the area inside the walls is 7km long by about 1.5 wide) built by the Chachapoyas (cloud warrior) civilization before the Incas came along and beat everyone. Because the area is so rarely touristed, the tour group (consisting entirely of the guide, myself, an English artist living in Peru, and her Limeño husband) had the whole complex to ourselves. The ruins themselves were amazing, but a very different experience to Machu Piccu given they were still being excavated, and the majority of the area inside the walls was still full of trees and plants that were growing around and inside the houses. The tour guide was excellent and informative, and one point positioned us strategically to block the line of sight of the archaeologists so that he could remove a stone from the wall of a mausoleum that was blocked off (the stone was loose already) and showed us the piles
KuelapKuelapKuelap

An example of one of the more overgrown areas
of human bones inside waiting for excavation.

Another night's sleep and i was off for a five hour hike to Gocta Falls with a couple of young Canadian guys. The hike itself was fantastic, and the track surprisingly undeveloped, passing local surcane processing facilities and small villages. We later found out that this was because the falls had only been discovered about five years earlier due to the locals fearing the wrath of a siren that lived under the waterfall if they disclosed it's location. The legend goes that she lured fishermen to their death, and had so far claimed the lives of eighty men and eight bulls (unsure how she accomplished the seduction of the bulls, but didn't ask). As we got further into the valley, the rocks lining the cliff face and ground started to become covered in fossils of shells from when the river used to fill the whole canyon. There were literally hundreds of the things.


The falls themselves were fantastic to watch. After something like 771m in free-fall (the 3rd highest in the world), the water breakes down into a mist from the air resistance, and falls in slow-motion for the last third or so before drifting down and across the top of the lake at the bottom in little rolling clouds. The mist at the bottom is so thick that you have to wear a poncho to get anywhere within about one hundred meters of it.


That night, i hopped on a bus to Piura to kick off what would become a two day epic bus adventure to get to Ecuador. Arrived at four in the morning, slept in the terminal until everything opened, and then had quite an adventure figuring out where the terminal that takes international buses to Loja, Ecuador, was. The next international bus wasn't until 9pm, so i wasted a whole day in Piura waiting for it. There is nothing to do in Piura. The trip into Ecuador was an interesting one... I got sat next to (and partially underneath) a gigantic obese Peruvian man, and spent the three hours before we reached the border control with my limbs in the isle of the bus, and the rest of me engulfed in sweaty latin american man-flesh. He also snored like he'd eaten a running lawnmower. At the border, after convincing an Ecuadorian policeman that he didn't need to slice open my backpack to search for drugs and i could just unlock the padlocks, i settled on a suitably delicate way of asking the conductor if i could change seats. In english, it was something like ¨Can i please take another seat? The man to my side is a bit too large for just one seat¨. Worked a treat. Arrived in Loja at 5am, and then got sold a ticket to Vilcabamba on a bus which was in the process of pulling out of the terminal and had to run across the tarmac with my luggage to get it before it exited the terminal. Needless to say, i spent pretty much all day today sleeping. It was delicious.


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15th December 2010

David what can I say - you are my hero. Entertaining, urban and downright funny Lots of love Alison
15th December 2010

David what can I say - you are my hero. Entertaining, urban and downright funny Lots of love Alison
17th December 2010

So true you posted it twice. Understandable. Thanks Alison!

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