De las playas a las Sierras

The next stop on my southbound beach tour was Huanchaco, a small suburb of the city Trujillo. It was really quiet there (I can´t count the times I heard the word "tranquilo" during my stay), with all the Southern Hemispherians back in school after their summer break (what happened to all the Australians!!). I made a friend on the bus from Máncora to Trujillo, a french boy who spoke spanish and a little english (but refused to speak to me in english, since I couldn´t speak to him in french). We hung out for time I spent in Huanchaco, and it was a great opportunity to practice my spanish.

There wasn´t much to do in Huanchaco except hang out on the beach, surf (which I didn´t do, the water there was cooolld!), and see the nearby pre-incan ruins from the Moche and Chimu civilizations. The first, Chan Chan, was declared by UNESCO to be the world´s largest city built entirely from mud brick. The Chimu people inhabited it from A.D. 800 to 1400, when it was conquered by the Incas. The other site, el Huaca de la Luna, was a bit more interesting. The Chimu culture evolved from the Moches, who flourished in AD 100 to 600. The Moches had this temple, Huaca de la Luna, and every hundred years they would completely fill the whole thing in with mud bricks so that the old temple was now just like a blank foundation and build another temple on top of it. Turns out that they never got too creative with their temples, each new one looked pretty much like the old one, so the archaelogists have stopped excavating down because in order to see the first temple (which probably looks a lot like the third, which looks a lot like the fourth...) they would need to destroy the top 5 temples to see it.

Now, I´m in Huaraz, back in the mountains. It was a pretty rough shock getting off the bus this morning coming from the tropical beach weather to 3000some meters altitude. Tomorrow I start a trek in the cordierras blancas, home to 33 peaks over 5500m altitude, the highest mountain in Peru, and Alpamayo, a mountain that UNESCO declared the most beautiful mountain in the world (who are they to make these claims?).