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Published: September 28th 2006
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Arriving in Lima on Sep 19, I set out to gather what supplies I needed and then to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible, heading for
northern Peru. Lima is noisy, polluted, big, and sprawling. And it is daunting to find your way around without getting mugged. You learn to ration your time walking the streets, as all the noise and exhaust fumes make you fatigued and disoreinted in a few short hours.
For nine months of the year, Lima is enveloped in a damp ´´garua´´ fog (not unlike San Francisco summers), melding with the street-level smog to produce a thick, cold, toxic haze. Although it is only 12 degrees south of the equator you wouldn´t know it.
I gathered my topo maps from the military mapping service (available nowhere else but Lima), stopped by the South American Explorers clubhouse to get some info, and took in a few of the sites. Peru has endless ruins, churches, museums, and the like and unless you are really into this kind of stuff, you have to pick and choose. My threshold is pretty low. I can get ´´ruined out´´ pretty quickly.
Since I wanted an overview of
the rich pre-Columbian cultures I headed to the Museo de la Nacion, where a quirky tour guide, Imelda, walked me through some 5000 years of Peruvian archaeology in about 40 minutes. There is a lot to know with this stuff, but basically:
* it is about more than just the Inca - there were also the Moche, Wari, and others
* a series of different empires preceded the Inca, each wiped out by climate fluctuations
* the Inca were accomplished empire-builders but some of the other pre-Inca cultures actually had more refined ceramic and textile designs
How´s that for short and sweet.
After learning about each of these cultures and their climate-driven downfalls, I found a wonderful display at the back of the museum entitled ´´El petroleo y gas naturale´´ featuring a talking dinosaur designed to get the kiddies all pumped up on petroleum. Somehow, the museum curators must have missed the irony. The display was generously sponsored by PetroPeru!
I also visited the baroque-style Church of San Francisco (built 1546-1674) with its spooky catacombs where an estimated 75,000 devotees are buried. They finally stopped burying dead Catholics there in the late 19th century when it
became too full. The church developed elaborate composting procedures - including the use of lime to speed the decomposition process. And they were perpetually tunneling deeper to make more space...gruesome!
In Lima I also discovered a general lack of good backpacking food. There is lots of quinoa down here (which I love), but also too much textured vegetable protein (TVP - which I am not fond of). Those of you with good TVP recipes (are there any?), please send them my way.
Leaving Lima, I headed north up the coast, stopping at Lomas de Lachay National Park, about 110 km north of Lima. You won´t find this place in the guide books - it lacks sexy rainforest and stunning Andean peaks. But it is a very, very cool place if you hit it in the right season. Getting there was tough and I had to root around, checking in at five different bus companies before I found one that would drop me off at the right place. The bus driver burned right past my drop-off point even after I told him twice where I was going. Alas, perhaps he misunderstood my exquisite Spanish which amounts to a few
broken phrases, frantic hand-waving, and scribbled notes.
But all that pain and anguish was worth it. That same ´´garua´´ fog which chokes and freezes you in Lima, also feeds a rich coastal desert ecosystem. It nearly never rains at Lachay but its loma hills are fed solely by transpiration. What you see driving by on the Pan-American highway looks less than promising (see photo with sign below), but as you go inland and up in elevation, things get more interesting.
Lachay has scores of endemic birds, insects, and plants, including wild varieties of tomatoes, potatoes, and tobacco. When I was there, the yellow Amancae was in bloom and there were wonderous red and black ´´turtupilin´´ birds flitting about. It was right out of the Akira Kurosawe film ´´Dreams´´. I am probably boring some of you...I´ll move on.
Next it was up the coast by local collectivo buses to Casma to see the Sechin ruins, dating from 1600 BC. It sounded good in my guidebook, but I guess I need to learn to be a more intelligent guidebook consumer... The stones surrounding the temple narrate a battle. There were lots of severed heads depicted.... Apparently, the king-dude was
a real bad-ass. The style was Matt Groening-esque.
Next stop, Trujillo, a pleasant colonial town on the north coast of Peru which is close to some good surfing (which I plan to get back to soon). Then I hopped a bus inland to Cajamarca.
Reaching Cajamarca felt good. The pace of life on the coast is a bit frantic, but things slow down in the mountain towns. I quickly found my landmark: an excellent ice cream shop with a multitude of flavors including ´´cerveza´´ and ´´pisco´´.
I visited Cumbe Mayo ruins with its 3000 yr old irrigation canal which diverts water across the continental divide, dropping only 40 cm over 5 km. The landscape reminded me a bit of central Oregon with golden bunchgrass-covered hills against a steel grey sky.
From Cumbe Mayo I hiked approx 65 km through some splendid country to the town of San Pablo and the Kuntur Wasi ruins. I camped out two nights enroute, the second at Kuntur Wasi. As the sun went down and a thunderstorm passed, the site guard, his wife, two kids, and I snacked on dried apricots from the Jones´ Tonasket, WA farm. We swapped little bits
of information about each other in broken (very broken) Spanish. In the morning I was treated to amazing vivid light on the mountains all around.
Then it was back to Cajamarca to replenish my food supplies (with raw beef from the market, yum!), do some laundry, and take a dip in the ´´Inca baths´´, a hotsprings of sorts. Cajamarca is famous for these baths, and also as the place where the last Inca, Atahualpa, was murdered by the Spanish.
Now its onto Chachapoyas...
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Stuart Rosenfeld
non-member comment
Lima onward
Ted- Great summary. Very succinct, which is what I need when travelling vicariously. Looking forward to more reports. Stay safe! Stuart