South America

A long driving day of 12 hours and we got to our hotel at Huanchaco, a stop off point for visiting the Chan Chan ruins and the Sun and Moon pyramids. We camped in the grounds of the hotel, even though it only cost £2 each to upgrade to a room - damn this budget! The hotel had a couple of cool pet tortoises wandering around the grounds, while I went on the internet to look for the cheapest Galapagos trips.

The next day we picked up our guide who took us to the pre-Inca ruins of Chan Chan city. The ruins are huge. Chan Chan is only one of the city complexes on this site and is famous for its large walls surrounding the city and it's labyrinthine layout. The site is undergoing a lot of restoration work because the walls were only made out of mud, rather than stone which the Incas used. There is only one entrance to the city and, once inside, we wandered around the thin passages looking at areas like the huge open marketplace, the graveyard and the small doorless houses. The walls within the city had degraded a lot, but it was still possible to see the patterns carved into the mud, which would have been painted in bright colours if the weather hadn't worn them down. This wasn't the case at the Sun and Moon pyramid which we visited next.

The Sun and Moon temple had only been discovered recently and is still like a huge archeological site, with people beavering away with their toothbrushes and little scrapers. We entered the temple from the back where there is a large holy rock which was used for human sacrifice. Loads of dead bodies were discovered around the stone where the offerings were left for the God of the mountain which overshadowed the temple.

Further into the temple we could see the mud bricks that were used for the walls. Each brick had a distinct mark on one side which was the identifier of its creator. This way, the foreman could count how many bricks each of the slaves had made.

For the first time at any ruins we have visited (which is a lot) we were shown paintings that have withstood the test of time. The inside of the temple had been decorated with intricately carved blocks depicting the Creator, 2 metres high and painted in red, blues and greens. The reason these paintings have lasted is because they had been deliberately buried by the Moche people. It is thought that each time a new ruler took over, they buried the old temple and built a new one on top of it, more splendid and impressive than the last. This gives the pyramid its shape, but makes it quite hard for the archeologists to excavate because the walls are not supported by any structural work. We also saw our first sight of a funny-looking, traditional Peruvian Hairless Dog.

That night we stayed at a hotel in a town full of massive locusts and the next morning visited the Sipan museum. The museum is supposed to be the best in Peru, if not, South America. The whole museum is dedicated to the burial site of the Lord of Sipan which was discovered in 1987 by archeologists. The burial site is unique in that only a small number of artifacts have been stolen by grave robbers. Much of the grave was intact, including the body of the king and the hundreds of personal possessions that were buried with him. Even his wife, dog, son and concubines were sacrificed and buried with him. The amount of gold these people wore was obscene. He had a gold hat, nose plate, earrings, chest plates, back plates, statues, necklaces - everything. It must have looked impressive. A lot of items were actually gold plated copper which was done from 100AD to 500AD, over a thousand years before gold plating was used in Europe. The museum exhibition finished by showing a really cheesy animatronic version of what life would have been like in Sipan times, it even had a musician puffing out his cheeks and dog with a wagging tail.