Advertisement
Published: November 13th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Its been an interesting week since Banos (and if anyone noticed my facebook page, I wrote that "Matt is feeling pretty relaxed chilling out in Banos", however, banos means toilets in Spanish which is perhaps a bit too George Michael, so I've quickly changed that!).
On our way to Cuenca, we stopped off at Ingapirca, the most important Inca site in Ecuador. It was pretty impressive and we had a wonderful guide who was on turbo, as she was trying to avoid the gathering thunderstorm (three years ago a German tourist was killed by a bolt of lighting whilst standing on the main monument).
We spent a couple of days in Cuenca, a town full of colonial buildings, which was our last stop in Ecuador. It was pleasant enough but one of our party got mugged so we have all been a little bit more careful since then. Cuenca is also famous for being where the Panama hat originated (I also was confused by the name which I thought was self-explanatory). A number of the group bought a hat but unfortunately our driver´s blew off on the next travel day and is lost in a ravine somewhere near the
border!
From Cuenca we crossed the border into Ecuador. The crossing itself took one and a half hours and involved having our trucked weighed at regular intervals. As we are over the weight limit our tour guide made us all stand at the back to try to even out the weight distribution, which was fine but surely one of the guards only had to look through the windows to see what was going on. However, I don´t think they are paid enough to bother. Naturally, I was asked to assume my normal position on the back row. Amusingly, we had an ice cream seller who literally chased us over the border shouting "1 dollar, 1 dollar" for his cornettos.
The contrast between Ecuador and northern Peru is really stark. We were travelling down the pacific highway through the Atacarma desert, so a lot of the land is very arid and desolate (in fact about 10% of the land can be farmed through irrigation, which is a bit disconcerting as you doze off looking at desert and wake up to rice fields). The land is also full of litter which wasn't the case in Ecuador - it just gets
dumped for mile after mile by the roadside. We also saw our first shantytowns (I think someone said Lima had the largest in the world after the displacement from the recent earthquakes).
We stayed three days in a small fishing village called Punta Sal where we camped. We arranged a tent putting up competition for the girls (no sexist thinking behind this just lazyness on the blokes part) as their equivalent to the Movember challenge.
(Re. latest position on beard, I am not getting much support in terms of the group betting. I think it stopped growing after four days so it is looking a bit patchy and certainly not amongst the leading candidates. It's also bloody itchy.)
Unfortunately, the pair I was sponsering came last (mostly because the others got help from their sponsors whilst my unique brand of advice and consultancy support no compensation for practical knowledge!).
As our forfeit, we had to provide the next evening's entertainment, which consisted of a performance of Summer Nights from Grease. After several Cuba Libres, I took up my position as supporting male #1 and proceded to provide backing dancing and vocals with as much gusto as
I could muster, about five seconds after everyone else. Unfortuately, a number of the group videoed the whole three and a half minutes and I imagine there is a bootleg version on You Tube. After more drinking (which was needed for all concerned), we finished the evening with some skinny dipping. Probably a good thing it was dark!
Camping was good fun. We had a bbq and a camp fire, played some volleyball and I spent most of the afternoon sleeping in an old man's chair. We went fishing with some local fisherman which was initial good fun but the combination of hangover, early starts and high waves meant I felt sea sick after an hour (much to the amusement of the rest of the boat). On the way out we saw dolphins and whales. We all managed to catch some fish although I didn't land the big variety (but size doesn't matter, right? Also notice lack of knowledge about all things maritime). We were real hunter gatherers though, as we let the local fishermen kill and then fillet our fish before getting the local restaurant to cook it for us. Delicious!
From Punta Sal, we moved to
Huanchaco, another coastal town. On the way we stopped off at the Lord of Saipan museum. I would love to say more but it was all in Spanish. Essentially, I think he was a very rich bloke who was buried in a multi-story temple that experts compare in importance to the Egyptians. Also he had a lot of gold armour, ear rings, etc.
Huanchaco is notable for being the place where they belived surfing originated. The local fisherman stand up on boats made out reeds and they can be seen riding the waves back to the beach with their catch. Unfortunately, for me it is notable for being the place where I caught sunstroke.
Whilst in Hunanchaco, we visited Chan Chan, the largest adobe (i.e. built out of mud bricks) city in the world built in around 1300AD. It has nine royal compounds (each king built his own) and our visit round one took over an hour (it's huge!). All Peru´s archelogical sites have a hairless dog at them (it must be the equivalent of the ravens(?) at the Tour of London). Anyway our group spent more time photographing the dog than the ancient civilisation.
We then
moved on to visit Las Huancas del Sol y de la Luna (the temple of the Sun and the Moon). We had a guided tour of the the Temple of the Sun which is (and I quote direct from my guide book) Peru´s largest pre-Columbian structure built 700 years before Chan Chan out of 140 million mud bricks. Despite erosion, mostly from the wind, it is still a very impressive structure and a lot of the art work remains, although we did have information overload, so that one mural looked much like another.
If you want to know more (and god knows I´m sure I´ve sold it to you), visit www.chanchan.gob.pe
Anyway, all these monument look more impressive in photos, which I promise to put up soon!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.326s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 10; qc: 52; dbt: 0.1103s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb