An Audience with The Lord of Sipan

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Day 252 Tuesday 19^th June

We started the day with breakfast overlooking the water before the fun of town and trying to get money out again. We walked along the beach to town which takes about 35 minutes and at low tide is easy, but at high tide has you scrambling over rocks. We are lucky today on our walk as it is low tide so we got the easy walk, but once in town we have to face the ATM machines and as we tried each one we had the same result, no money. We finally got to one of the last machines in town and there was a screen around it and guards working on it, a glimmer of hope. Two American girls were already queuing, as the screen was removed and they approached the machine one said “if this works I’ll jump off a cliff” obviously they had been trying for days to get money out too. Much to everyone’s surprise it worked, though I hope she chose not to jump off the cliff. We decided to try to get tickets out of town to Chiclayo for tomorrow, the first two bus places were no help at all but the third gave us options. We could catch an early “special bus” around 7.00am or an “economico bus” at 11.00am. Now I know a lot of people in my life have called me “special” but it was always sarcastically, and I know those same people would get a giggle out of me being on a “special bus” but we chose the “economico”. It wasn’t so much the cost (only 5 Sol extra) but the timing, and as it was supposedly 5 hours to Chiclayo we didn’t need to leave so early….well at least that’s what we thought. After buying the tickets they told us to catch the bus at “Etti”, which we had no idea where this was or even if it is somewhere in town, when we arrived here we were dumped at the beginning of town as there is no bus terminal. In the end the woman who sold us the ticket just gave up trying to explain where we needed to go and just told us to come back to her office.

We brought a Coke and walked back along the beach to the hotel for the last time as tomorrow it will be a taxi to town with our bags. The tide was just starting to rise so we didn’t have to scramble over the rocks and got to pass the pelicans and blue footed boobies at the jetty. Well I could say we did a strenuous hike somewhere for the rest of the day, but the truth is we grabbed our books and headed to the beach sun lounges and just laid around reading and watching the ocean. We stayed there till the sunset before moving five steps to the restaurant for dinner. We have decided to pack in the morning so we just continued to watch and listen to the ocean before finally saying goodbye to Andres and Sophia the owner’s nephew and his wife and going back to our room.



Day 253 Wednesday 20^th June

Woke up and had our bags packed before breakfast which starts at 8.30am, we wandered down and enjoyed our last breakfast overlooking the beach. We checked with the hotel where Etti was and found out that it was basically where we were dropped off coming into town, there is a bus ticket office that appears to be the spot where the buses stop. We arrived half an hour early and just sat in the office till 11.00am, then 11.15 and 11.30, we had been told that the bus might not arrive till about 11.30. Soon it was 11.45am and then 12.00, the lady in the office got on the phone and told us that the bus was held up at the police checkpoint between Tumbes and Mancora and then the office staff disappeared across the road for lunch leaving us there. When people came in to buy tickets we just informed them it was lunchtime, about an hour later they reappeared but not our bus. At 1.30pm we were told that the bus was 15 minutes away but this is Peru and we finally saw the bus coming down the road at 2.00pm only 2 hours late. We had been told that this was a 6 hour trip so if we left at 11.00am we would get to Chiclayo about 5.00pm in daylight, now it would be about 7.00pm still not too bad. Things to know about the “economico bus” – no toilet; no air-conditioning, but the windows open so that is OK; only some seat have arm rests; lots of stops for no apparent reasons although some were so the passengers could get off to pee behind the bus while the other passenger called out “vamous” (go); later when it was dark we discovered there were no lights inside the bus but thankfully the headlights do work but were only turned on when it was pitch dark. Despite all this it was not too bad but I would not want to do a longer trip in this class. The other passengers did keep us amused I think they had ants in their pants, they continually jumped around and moved from seat to seat and of course grabbed the seats in front for grim death even if it meant pulling the person in fronts hair, usually mine. Scott said that for a lot of the trip the woman behind was clinging to my seat with her head only a few centimetres above mine, every time he looked at me he said it was comical because there was this other set of eyes peering over the seat. Every now and then I would get a fright as her hand came around the side of the chair and nearly grabbed me. This seat hugging is very common here so you do get used to it and when my hair gets pulled a bit harder I do usually get a sorry so all is good.

This journey was so slow but the scenery was interesting outside Mancora there were amazing arid redish hills that we wound through while still getting glimpses of the ocean, this gave way to desolate areas that had little vegetation and looked completely lifeless. Just outside Piura there is a large irrigation scheme in the desert that suddenly turns everything green with crops of rice and cotton which are huge water uses and of course palm trees, it looks so strange. On the other side of Piura it turns back into flat sandy desert with sand dunes in the distant. We watched the sun disappear from the desert and eventually started to see lights of a town so we were getting closer to our destination. We stopped at a smaller town and not far down the road we arrived at the outskirts of Chiclayo and were all dropped off at the side of the road. Everyone got off the bus and because they are locals and a bit more savvy than us they all got a taxi or rickshaw very quickly and left us by ourselves in the dark beside a very busy street. It took us about 10 minutes to get a taxi and we had no idea where we were, but as it turned out it was not too far from the centre but it took us ages to get to the hotel as this city is one big traffic jam.

We arrived at the hotel at 8.00pm and were told that they only had one room left, how lucky, so we grabbed it. We dropped the bags off and hit the streets for dinner we saw a Pizza place (Venecia) on the main street that is mentioned in the Lonely Planet so crossed the street and went in and we just got a table the place was packed. The pizza we chose was good but some of the others we saw had cheese spilling off them. As we left there was a line up outside the door so it is definitely popular. After a small walk down the street to Plaza de Armas we went back to the hotel to collapse.



Day 254 Thursday 21^th June

Breakfast is pretty good here except for you guessed it the coffee. All we have planned today is chores like find a laundry, book a tour and get more money out and then head to the markets. We wandered for a while showing our laundry the sites until a local man came up to us and pointed around the corner, he must have seen the desperate looks on our faces to get rid of the big bag of dirty clothes. Sure enough there was a laundry around the corner and opposite was a tour company mentioned in the LP, so we completed two chores. We went to the markets before the bank as we had read that there were pickpockets around which is nothing new in any market in the world. These markets are very big although not a lot of interest for tourists there are mainly everyday items and food. One interesting point is that there was a row of barbers and hairdressers and right beside them were vendors selling meat and vegetables – “Would you like some hair with your steak”. Just as well Scott wasn’t getting his hair cut today otherwise the special at the butchers would be “beef with grey sprinkles”. We pushed around past a section selling fish when a man pushed in between me and Scott and stopped blocking Scott, he felt a hand from behind at his leg where his wallet was in his pocket so he tried to grab it and it stopped. Scott spun around to confront the pickpocket and was confronted by a woman in her 60’s with a young guy standing behind her. Punching her in the nose sprung to his mind along with a headline in the Peruvian news “Tourist assaults grandmother in markets, in jail pending trial”. It could have been the young kid behind her? Or more likely both of them along with the guy who blocked us and perhaps the person who sang out “gringo” as we walked by, but in the end they got nothing from us today so what can you do; wish them better luck with the next tourists? You have to be on your guard all the time especially in crowded places, but this did not stop us, we just gave death stares to the suspects and keep walking. In these markets there are meant to be shamans selling herbs and cures to all sorts of ailments, but all we saw were some nice smelling herbs and some dodgy looking people selling bottles with coloured liquid inside and pictures of muscle bound men or the word sexual on the outside. The Lonely Planet warned that a lot of the Shamans here are shams and it certainly had that sort of feel and look. I do not think I would come here to get cured but if you need oregano for the spaghetti this is the right place.

We walked back to Plaza de Armas and the street with all the banks to start what we hope is not a continual problem in Peru. We tried 4 banks and no luck we could not get money out this time it appeared that they didn’t want to accept our mastercard not sure if there was a problem with our type of mastercard, but when we eventually tried the visa card it worked – who knows, it is just so random.

Before going for dinner we headed down to the hotel bar where we got a complimentary Pisco sour, before heading out to dinner.





Day 255 Friday 22^nd June

Over the last couple of weeks we had sort of despaired a bit (as much as you can when you are travelling as long as we are) about the fact that we haven’t done much exciting or seen much historical for a while, but today that all changes. Colombia was such a great experience full of so many lovely colonial towns, but not to many challenges or ancient history. As for Ecuador it was filled with way too many challenges…..not getting mugged. We are now in Peru a country chocka block full of history and today we were off to see a great slice of it.

After breakfast we got ourselves ready and then walked the 5 blocks to “Mocha tours” where we waited for our tour to start. At 10 our guide turned up and we boarded our van for the day with 6 others, and before leaving the town we picked up another 2 people. The others on this tour were all from South America except for one Canadian Woman who could speak Spanish. Our guide for the day thankfully always spoke to us in English as well as Spanish and made a real effort to ensure we understood everything.

Most people when thinking of ancient civilisations of South America always think only of the Inca, but as civilisations go they were very brief (although very intense) and were only around for about a hundred years. During their brief existence (1438AD – 1533AD) they managed to conqueror over a dozen other civilisations from Chile to Colombia before they themselves were conquered by the Spaniards. Our tour was all about one of those long forgotten ancient cultures, the Moche who dominated this area from about 100AD to 800AD and also the Sican and Chimu culture who took over till about 1350AD. First on the agenda today was the town of Sipan about 30km South of Chiclayo where ancient tombs of the Moche were only discovered in 1987. Locals had started plundering a yet unknown burial ground and the authorities were only alerted when the grave robbers started buying brand new cars and having endless parties. When archaeologists moved in they identified a series of huge mud brick pyramids one of which was filled with tombs. Thankfully the looters never made it to the best of the tombs and the haul of treasures they recovered has rightfully been compared to what was recovered from Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt. For those that have old copies of the National Geographic magazine the finds were covered in the October 1988 and May 1994 editions.

Today the pyramids just resemble small hills of dirt and it is only on close inspection that you can see the occasional glimpse of bricks through the slides of dirt. The pyramids unlike the Egyptian types were constructed of millions of mud bricks, and were truncated and included ramps to gain access to the top platform. They aren’t as big as the pyramids of Giza but sort of reminded me of the pyramid of Saqarra. This area of Peru is generally fairly dry except when an El Nino event occurs and then it rains buckets. In Australia an El Nino means an Eastern seaboard drought but for Peru it means disastrous floods, and may have contributed to the downfall to these civilisations. Over the centuries these pyramids have been washed into a shape that looks like nothing more than a small hill of dirt and may be why they went undetected for so long. The pyramid containing the tombs started as a single low platform but after each burial a new level was added. Archaeologists now believe there are over a dozen levels and thankfully most of the tombs have been successfully investigated. The deep excavations have been left open and replicas of the finds have been left at the bottom to show approximately what was found and how. With most burials the king was laid to rest with things he would require in the afterlife, like weapons and food, along with a guard, his wife and one of his children. I guess you don’t want to be late for the first family meeting after father dies, “Hi Juan, I’m sorry mate but we just took the vote and it appears you are staying with Dad”. Often the warrior that was put with the king would have his feet cut off so he couldn’t desert his duties, unsure how effective a footless swordsman would be. Because there is next to no written records from this time all things about this civilisations are speculation like if those feet were cut off before or after the warrior was poisoned. Alongside these melted pyramids was a small museum that was filled with a range of great artefacts from the tombs although the best pieces were to be found in the museum at Lambayeque which we would visit in the afternoon.

From Sipan we headed back to Chiclayo past endless fields of Sugar cane. Since arriving in this area we have noticed how smokey the place is and yesterday in town we had ash raining down on us constantly. Today we realised why because it is harvest season and they are burning the crops everywhere. At Chiclayo we picked up another couple of tourists and drove onto Lambayeque where we stopped for lunch at an overpriced restaurant. After our feed we drove a further 30km North to the town of Tucume which was the capital of the Sican, which were probably the descendants of the Moche. They hung about from about 750AD to 1375AD and in the Tucume area constructed no fewer than 26 pyramids, along with elaborate temples, compounds and other buildings. Archaeologically this is a young site and excavations only really started here back in 1991, and as yet no large or elaborate tombs have been discovered. Like Sipan the pyramids look like nothing more than small hills of loose dirt till you spot small samples of mud bricks. We climbed up a nearby hill to a lookout where we had an amazing view over the entire area and what a view it was. The number and size of the pyramids and structures was quite astounding and one of them, which is 750 metres long and 260 metres wide is now regarded as the largest temple in South America. Because Tucume is now being extensively researched and because of this most of the place is off limits, but the view from the lookout made up for the lack of access at ground level. It is hard to believe that this place has only been recently “discovered” and was amazing to see.

From Tucume we headed back to the town of Lambayeque and to the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipan, which houses the vast majority of the finds from the pyramids of Sipan. We didn’t get to the museum till 4.30 and our guide had told us it closed at 5 so we didn’t know if it was worth paying the 20 sol ($8) each entry fee, especially as we couldn’t take photos. As it turned out the museum stayed open till 6 and our guide gave us a brilliant guided tour through the vast elaborate collection. Seeing the raw stone cut tombs in the morning was great but to see what they hauled out of them was beyond remarkable. The bulk of the contents were from only two tombs, one being the most extensive “Lord of Sipan” tomb, and the other from a tomb that was about 300 years older. Through DNA testing they have revealed that the two are related and so proves that not all the kids had to die with their father. The museum is great because it shows just how the finds were found and then you can see how the item was restored. I found the beaded jewellery the most remarkable, because the king was buried with 12 sets and 4 of them were layered on top of each other, and each one consisted of thousands of minute coral beads that were once held together with long gone cotton. The Archaeologists had to somehow remove the thousands of beads from the site and then work out how they went back together. There isn’t a lot of gold or silver in the jewellery but the workmanship is stunning, and on the ground floor is the bone remains of the Lord of Sipan. Apparently he suffered badly from poor bones, which they think was caused by the fact that he never walked anywhere but was carried. I sort of had a mental image of “Mr Burns” from the Simpsons. The guy also used to have a large copper nose piece which covered his mouth so that no one could see him talk and see his emotions, which helped “hide” him as a human and gave the perception that he was a God. The finds from this tomb are rightfully compared to Tutankhamen’s and if you are in this area do not miss this museum, we just wished we could take photos so you could see how incredible they are.

From the museum we were taken back to Chiclayo as the sun slowly set, and was so happy for such a great day. The other people on the tour had been really nice, the guide was great and the sites incredible, a really fantastic day. We were dropped off at 6.45, picked up our laundry and then headed back to our hotel. Had a late dinner at “The Romana” Restaurant before crashing for the night.



Day 256 Saturday 23^rd June

We started the day with yet another average breakfast. You have all been really lucky because we haven’t complained about breakfast for a while but we are in a new country and I just can’t resist. The food is just the usual, scrambled eggs, bread rolls and jam, but the coffee in Peru is just plain nasty. The coffee in our hotel is the same as what we got in Cusco so I figure it might be a Peruvian thing, and basically consists of a small cup of cold coffee syrup that you put into your cup and then add hot water and milk. I made the mistake the first morning of putting the entire contents of this coffee “stuff” into my cup but have learnt from being sick all day to hold back a bit. We normally drink triple shot coffees so we like our coffee strong but nothing comes close to what they give you here. I remember when I used to work with Dad at a trucking company and we had to change the oil on the trucks and sometimes if it had been a while between changes the oil was so thick in the sump that once you removed the sump plug you had to sort of poke the oil out with a piece of wire and it would plop out like thick black yoghurt. Well the coffee here sort of reminds me of that, same sort of consistency, same sort of burnt smell and if I had cared to taste that old motor oil I could probably confirm the same taste. I think I will switch to tea for breakfast from now on.

Didn’t have a lot planned for today except getting tickets out of town, so after our “great” coffee we walked down to where we could get tickets for a bus. In all other countries in South America the towns have had a central bus terminal but so far in Peru it appears that every company has its own terminal or pick up point. Thankfully for us Chiclayo buses all seem to leave from the same street, about a block away. After walking the length of the street we discovered that all the buses to our next destination of Chachapoyas are all night buses and leave between 5pm to 9pm. If we had known that in advance we would have left tonight but it is past checkout time and we have a booking at our hotel we are stuck here for yet another day….damn. Got tickets for a bus tomorrow night and despaired at how to squeeze 2 hours of sightseeing into 2 days….oh well I guess we can look at the shops.

I (Shelley) need some new T-Shirts and cargo pants, but I quickly discovered this is the town where bad fashion from the 80’s has come to die or should die but it is being embraced. I could get a lovely t-shirt with lots of spangles that said “David the pear Bowie” and I have no idea what it means, but I am sure it would look good with a pair of white tights. I did try a pair of cargo pants but they fitted like tights which really was not a good look so surprisingly I brought nothing.

We decided to try somewhere different for dinner and Scott became invisible again and I had finished dinner before his arrived, this may be the norm. He does not seem to be getting a complex, but does get concerned when they look at him blankly when he asks where his dinner is?

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Photos

Tucume
Part of the temple complex

Mancora
Lazing on the Beach

Chiclayo
Plaza De Armas

Sipan
How the Lord of Sipan would have looked in his Hey Day

Sipan
One of the Pyramids

Sipan
A model of Sipan

Sipan
One of the actual tombs with a replica of what was found in it.

Sipan
Looking into one of the tombs

Sipan
Lord of Sipan's tomb and representation of what was found

Sipan
This is part of a huge necklace - smiley face

Sipan
Bones of the Warrior Priest

Sipan
Part of headdress

Sipan
2000 year old piece of pottery

Sipan
Burrowing Owl watching over the site

Sipan
Walls of the pyramid

Tucume
Showing the layers of the pyramid

Tucume
One of the Pyramids

Tucume
Pyramid complex

Tucume
Model of Tucume layout

Tucume
Overview

Tucume
Pyramid of Tucume

Tucume
No not a hill but a pyramid

Tucume
Pyramid ruins

Comments

[traudy glasencnik]

interesting!
Hey guys xx, wow,that was interesting. Your up on your history knowledge Scotty. I cant say that I have heard of these lost peoples/sites. The pyramids do look like hills with empty river crevasse\'s carved into them. Would never think of anything was in there outside of dirt i guess. Tombs look errie. Yep, sounds like your back to shit coffee, ewwwh, black gluggy syrup, really? They offer you that! xx

[steve]

Like a rat out of an aquaduct
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