Trujillo

This weekend I took a trip to a small city called Trujillo in the dessert of northern Peru. I left Lima at 10:30pm on Thursday night, and arrived in Trujillo at about 7am Friday morning after an 8+ hour bus ride, which actually wasn´t so bad because we watched A Cinderella Story and had intensely reclining seats that were pretty comfortabe. However, we did nap immediately upon checking into our hostal. When we woke up to begin the day a few hours later, we ate breakfast and made plans to go to Chan Chan, a big cluster of ruins from the Chimu civilization from 1200 - 1400 (when they were taken over by the Incas). The ruins were about 15 minutes outside of Trujillo and we hired a guide when we got there who taught us all about the culture and the ruins. Though they´re still excavating, we got to walk through a palace that was constructed like a maze, and it turns out there were 7 of them. They had a really cool irrigation system with an oasis-like area in the middle of the maze, 2 plazas with stages where they did human sacrifices, and a really interesting funerary complex with 24 graves because when the king died they killed all of his concubines. Then we drove to another section of the ruins called the Huaca Arco Iris Temple, which was a lot smaller, but a temple from which you can always see a rainbow after it rains. At the temple there were lots of the national Peruvian dogs running around- they have a really warm body temperature so they´re recommended to sleep with people with arthritis, but they are hairless and so ugly I would never get one.

When we returned to Trujillo and ate lunch, it was too late to do anything else but explore the city. We went to a toy museum that I was really looking forward to, but it turned out to be pretty creepy. We also went to the Lion´s Club to get a schedule of events because Trujillo has a month-long festival celebrating spring called Festival de la Primavera, which began on the 20th. We finally ended up in a clothing store called TopiTop trying on some of the tackiest clothing we could find. After dinner and another nap, we wanted to go out for the night, but all of the bars and clubs in our guidebooks turned out kind of lame. Finally we decided to check out a bar some people we met in TopiTop said they had recently opened called the Bohemia. When we arrived it was basically a small group of people with the two owners we met earlier and a band rehearsing. The band asked us if we knew any drum players because the drummers wife was having a baby, and my friend Stephanie said jokingly that she played the drums, but unfortunately they did not think it was a joke. Needless to say, the band quickly discovered she had no clue what she was doing, so she decided to make it worse and tell them I could sing (we all know how I sing). This turned into all of us and the band making some sort of mock band (after singing one song, the band´s singer handed me the tamborine), and we performed (if you can call it that) many Beattles songs, which led to Stephanie being nicknamed Gringo Star. Our concert was so good everyone encouraged us to return the next night but early, before the real band played.

The next morning we woke up early to see another set of ruins called the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna. These ruins were from another civilization called the Mochica, which dates from 100-900 but weren´t discovered until 1995! Right now there are basically two pyramids (one for the sun and one for the moon). They´re structured in layers (the sun is 11 levels and the moon is 5) because each time a ruler died they sealed the layer he ruled on and built a new one. As a joke, we told our guide that we were a Beattles cover band and in Trujillo because we played a concert last night. The guide took us in the moon pyramid, and there were amazingly decorated walls with the original brightly-colored paint. As we were leaving we saw a group of actors rehearsing a performance, which our guide informed us was for a really, really famous guy from the US named Robert Wilson who is so famous that none of us have ever heard of him nor could our guide tell us why he is famous. We just wanted to take a picture with the actors, but their director would not let them escape. Finally, we talked to the actor we took to be the King (he was especially serious about his performance), and we started telling him about our band and our concert when he cut us off to tell us he and his band were playing at the Bohemia later that night. His band was called Big Balls. We discovered Trujillo was a very small city.

After the ruins we went to a beach called Huanchaco, about 10 minutes from Trujillo. The weather was beautiful for a change from Lima, and the sand was so soft. The water was too cold for me, but there were a lot of people surfing because the waves were awesome (the biggest wave in the world was about an hour away). We enjoyed a nice lunch on the beach and got ice cream twice. There were also these boats called Cabellitos, which means little horse because you ride them like horses. They´re made out of straw and people fish on them, but I was too scared to take a ride (they looked really unstable). After watching the sunset on the beach, we returned to Trujillo via a packed micro (but everything had been costing a lot of money between expensive food, guides, taxis that had to wait at these rural sites, admission fees, etc.). We rinsed off the sand, got some dinner, and naturally returned to see the King perform at Bohemia and his singing was just as over the top as his acting. We were so exhausted from our busy weekend that we barely made it to the bus at 11:45. We had a really awesome view on the way home because we sat on the second level in the front row with panoramic windows, so we saw sugar cane fields and endless mountains and desserts, but it was also kind of scary because the highway was only two lanes (one in each direction) yet the bus passed people by using the lane going the opposite way. The ride back felt a lot longer and less plesant (probably because they showed dismal movies and served nasty food), but I passed the time thinking about how awesome the trip was and how lucky I am to spend my weekends like this.