Trujillo y la Costa de Niebla
Road to Trujillo, May 8
We have entered a strange land, mountains almost devoid of vegetation, some scrubby bushes and dry brown grass, the western ranges of the Andes. In the distance these mountains turn gray, blue, even purple in the afternoon haze, but up close they are brown and dreary. We’re riding along the shores of a vast emerald green lake, on which not a soul is swimming nor boating. It appears to be a reservoir fed by the river in whose valley we’ve been traveling all day. The name is Lago Gallito Ciego, or little blind rooster lake. I ask the man next to me where this name comes from; he looks at me like I’m crazy, so I drop the matter.
In certain areas above and below the lake, water diverted from the river allows for some plant life, and there are terraces of rice paddies, corn fields, trees along fence lines. But other than that, it’s bare desert. Tired-looking little brown towns, mud brick houses and tin roofs coated in dust.
Another day on the road, not a bad one so far. I’m on a real bus for the first time in Perú, and this allows for some space and comfort. There is the issue of the blasting television screen in the aisle, but with music in my headphones and a practiced avoidance, I can mostly ignore it. They are playing the ultra-violent series “The Punisher”, which before today I was not aware of.
Finally, after a half day of driving we are in the flatlands at last, with looming, ominous mountains above. Agricultural lands fed by a series of ditch-canals, dirt roads, dirt brick villages. People are poor down here, and you can feel it. They look poorer than in the highlands, but this may have to do with the bleak surroundings. At least up in the mountains they are rich in views and color. It shouldn’t be long before we hit the coast.
I have decided that my job at present is looking out the window on long rides and then writing about it. It’s a strange job, and unpaid. But I carry on. Today I will pass four hundred hours of transit time since I crossed the border into Mexico. If this was a full time job, it would be two and a half months of work.
Today I am thinking about my Uncle John. He is only 69 years old but has been fighting pancreatic cancer, and recently plagued by various infections. The email from my Mom yesterday said that he’d been diagnosed with sepsis and had a breathing tube inserted, and it seems to me that this is probably the end. While he had some health problems when I left Virginia ten months ago, he had seemed fine.
When I was young my Uncle John gave me a book called The Phantom Tollbooth, about a boy who goes traveling through the Kingdom of Wisdom, terribly divided between the land of words and the land of numbers, both of which have banished the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason. The book is full of strange conceptual characters and places, and as I look out at these barren, otherworldly landscapes, it doesn’t seem too far off. I haven’t thought of that book in years and years. Perhaps I need to read it again. A continent away, knowing I’ll almost certainly never see my Uncle again, he feels close to me today.
I remember when I was about seven and we took a road trip together to Asheville, North Carolina. When we went to an outdoor summer opera and he gave me the first taste of beer that I can recall (it wasn’t very good). I remember when we would drive in the car, he would sing along to (wordless) classical music. He would always correct the grammar of everyone around him. His favorite topic of conversation of recent years has been an elaborate, detailed conspiracy theory that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. He is a very intelligent man, a longtime professor of psychology, who has been developing an international simplified system of sign language. The system is done, but it doesn’t look like he’ll finish the book that introduces it.
I haven’t been a particularly good nephew. I haven’t much cultivated his company or friendship. He is a unique and brilliant man but socially difficult; tending to dominate conversations and lecture. He cares very deeply for people but has a hard time showing it; an extremely social loner. It is possible that he is the person I am most like in my family; at the same time we are very different. I think to some degree I have avoided him for the parts of myself I’m not comfortable with. Now that he is dying, I feel guilty. But the proximity of death means that whatever it has been, whatever relationship we had, is just exactly what we had. Nothing more, nothing less.
After twenty days or so in the highlands, I have made it back to sea level and the Pacific again, though at the moment we’re still some miles inland. From the crest of the mountains to the east of Cajamarca, we have descended eleven thousand feet to Ruta 1 Norte Perú, which also happens to be the Panamericana. At the moment we are passing through some sleepy scrappy dirty little town, a bunch of grain milling factories. Old people sitting in plastic chairs in front of their houses, looking at the coastal highway, which is fairly well-paved, but just one lane in each direction, bone dry hills in the distance.
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Last night I arrived in Trujillo, the third-largest city in Perú, just as it was getting dark. My original plan was to avoid the city and stay in the adjacent beach town of Huanchaco, but the taxi drivers wanted a minimum of twenty-two soles for a ride out there, too much, and I didn’t want to mess with finding a local bus at night. I’d met an older French couple, Vincent and Anna, on the bus. They are in their sixties and spending a month traveling around the country. Thirty years back they’d lived and worked as professors in Huaraz, and this was their first time returning. In the terminal they asked if I wanted to share a taxi to the Centro, and this seemed like as good an idea as any.
They were going to a hostel called La Casa de Conde, and I went along to see what it was about. You walk down a long hallway from the street, past the entrance area to a club, and this hall opens up to the air and becomes an alleyway. There, at most hours of the day and night you will find a motley array of young Venezolano displacees hanging out. Smoking en masse, strumming guitars, practicing the juggling and such that they do on the street for money. A chaotic scene, dogs running around chasing cats, a bunch of people cooking and watching TV in the main area.
It was dirty and loud and my first instinct was to leave, but I didn’t have anywhere else in mind, and I was tired. So I paid for a bed that they had to make up for me, in a big dorm dizzy with bunks. When I logged on to my email, I learned that my Uncle John had passed away that afternoon. Had known all day it was coming. I quietly said a Kaddish for him: V’imru, Amen. Went up on the roof to have a smoke and found it absolutely packed with tents, a tent city up there with dogs and puppies and pee stains on the concrete, and talked to a couple young folks playing guitar and singing.
Downstairs I met Daniel, a very talkative young Peruano with glasses and a big mess of curly hair who works at the hostel. He asked if I wanted to get some traditional food, always an easy sell. On the way he explained that he thinks it’s really important for people to be friendly to travelers — he spent a year traveling around South America and understands what it’s like to not know anyone or anything. He works at some kind of a consulting business during the day that I couldn’t quite figure out, the hostel at night, and as a running coach on the weekends. Un horario lleno, he said. We arrived at the corner of a back street with several food stands and a bunch of chairs set up on the sidewalk.
He ordered a variety of food from the corpulent woman who he said made the best platos, then told me the cost. I realized I was buying us both dinner, something we’d not previously discussed. Oh well. I appreciated his guide work. We sat down in the plastic chairs and devoured papa rellenas, an order of picarones — these kind of pretzel donuts made from squash and potatoes — doused in syrup, and washed it all down with a chicha morada, a drink made from purple corn that tasted like grape juice.
The stuffed potatoes weren’t so different than what I’d found in Colombia, mashed potatoes filled and then deep-fried until crispy, but in addition to the beef, they were also stuffed with cheese, carmelized onion and red pepper, a little shredded cabbage and crema on the side. I had to take it one step farther and ordered some chorizo relleno from the señora — this black-colored sausage which was tough and chewy and smelled of wet dog. No pensé que lo te gustaria, Daniel said, shaking his head.
We took a scenic route back through the centro, and we stopped in to the city museum to listen to the end of a free concert: two older men talking for long stretches around short stints of flamencoesque guitar. After, I stopped in to a little tienda to buy a liter of the local beer, aptly named Trujillo, which had notes of coins and an aroma of cardboard. At the hostel I pulled a little table from the dining room into the alleyway, plugged my computer in through a window into an outlet in one of the dorm rooms, and watched my Warriors win their series against the Pelicans.
All the while the Venezuelan youth were practicing unicycling with constant mishaps, riding bikes up and down the alley, singing in drunken voices, smoking in great numbers. I appreciated their enthusiasm but it was quite a chaotic scene and a little much for a tired traveler. Needless to say it wasn’t a good night of sleep in my twelve-bed dorm room, snorers and kissers, late arrivers and pre-dawn risers.
This morning I walked around the Centro, punctuated by a big corn-yellow cathedral that was very different than any I’d yet seen. As we are at the coast and there is little stone, it appeared to be made from adobe, at least the exterior. A broad Plaza de Armas with an impressive fountain and a dramatic monument: a green freedom-figure with a torch standing atop a globe, several bemuscled sculpted figures below in agony. My interpretation: Liberty Bests the Strong.
There were a group of forty or so protesters in front of the municipal building in the far corner of the square, with signs about schools and children, chanting face to face with a dozen police in riot gear. I walked to the city museum, looked half-heartedly at paintings, read about the famous local poet César Vallejo. He helped form the Grupo Norte here in Trujillo, a bohemian circle of artists and writers from the 1910’s (I want to be part of a bohemian circle in the 1910's). The exhibit made no mention of how Vallejo had almost no success when he lived here, was unjustly arrested for arson for political reasons in the early twenties, or had to go live in impoverished exile in France. He never returned to Perú, but now was being celebrated as a favored son.
I found my way to another, smaller plaza some blocks away, and got a plate of sanguches de lechon, roasted pork with minced onions and a yellow sauce made from cream and egg yolks. Then back to the hostel to collect my bags, walked five busy blocks to where I could catch a bus, forty minutes out here to Huanchaco.
Got off the bus as soon as we hit the town, and walked carrying my heavy bags along the malecón overlooking the beach. I didn’t have a place lined up to stay, so I just wandered for awhile. Somehow, though the sun was strong, it was a chilly day, much colder than Trujillo just inland. Though we are square in the heart of the tropics, at 8 degrees latitude south, the ocean looks to be very cold. I’d heard about the Humboldt current coming from Antarctica, but that is a very long way away. There was no one swimming in the blue waters, just surfers in full-body wetsuits. No one was sunbathing on the grey sand; the only people walking the beach were wearing jackets.
I eventually found my way to the Hostal Naylamp, which has a large open campground with grass and trees, and pitched my tent on one side. Soon after I met Connor from Toronto, who seemed on the verge of a breakdown. He is this lost theater guy full of regrets, things he should have done, and trailed off the end of most of his sentences with ‘I dunno’ and ‘sorry’. Said he’d gotten stuck here in Huanchaco, should have left a month ago, has some kind of undiagnosed degenerative mysterious condition. He told me all sorts of strange things right away. I tried to be nice to him, but honestly felt really uncomfortable in his company. After ten minutes of this strange interaction, he wandered off to lie in a hammock and smoke, and I went to find the mercado to buy some food.
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Huanchaco, May 10
The end of a day, sitting back on the couch outside the campground kitchen, drinking a cup of hot chocolate. Somewhere along the road, methinks in Colombia, I picked up the habit of making chocolate caliente from bars of chocolate, steaming milk, whisking the mixture with these particular geared wooden spoons. A cold night after a chilly day. Turns out you don’t have to be at high altitude to find something like winter in the tropics. It’s the ocean, El Pacifico, and you can feel it the closer you get to the water, reminiscent of my experience with this ocean in Northern California. For much of the past thirty hours, it has been overcast; the sky covered in a light grey, mist and fog coming in from the sea.
The travelers here seem kind of sad. The aforementioned Conor, deep in some kind of travel-life regret; Vanessa from Poland is better but can’t stop shivering half the day after surfing, mostly counting the days until her boyfriend arrives; Isa the nineteen year old German, almost at the end of her seven month trip, trying to cram as much Peru in as possible. The locals aren’t very friendly and have this dead-pan disaffected look. Very different from the mountains, where people seemed more alive.
Huanchaco is a famous beach town, and maybe it is nice in the summer — which is only a couple months off — but it doesn’t speak to me. Very limited vegetation: a few palm trees along the promenade, but mostly the terrain is just sandy dirt, with bare brown cliffs above the town. The street facing the blue ocean is very touristy; back from the beachfront it quickly gets grim and dirty. There are street dogs everywhere, and you can smell dog piss on the sidewalk. Feels like the whole place needs to be washed; that it hasn’t rained in a year.
There are good things — there’s a certain dreaminess to a foggy coast, lending itself to contemplation. It’s quiet at this hostel, except when the guys are hammering away on some building project. Sleeping with the sound of the waves is lovely, and I’ve been able to get some writing done. Spent most of the day writing a chapter about another beach, Playa Matilda in Nicaragua, a warmer and more colorful place that seems very far away. I think it was my single favorite beach of this journey. There is some delicious seafood here: I had an excellent dinner of Arroz con Mariscos tonight at a little bar-restaurant facing the ocean. All kinds of shellfish and octopus in a slightly spicy savory rice with peppers and onions.
But all in all, it’s just a place, a stop along the way, and if at this point in my travels I was a little more motivated and efficient with my time, I would have left already. It’s very easy, though, to wake up in the morning and say, no, I won’t be getting on buses today. Alas, I am a weary traveler, and dallied most of the day at this campground. Aside from the writing, my other accomplishment of the day was a walk along a cold beach and up to a yellow church on the hillside above town, noteworthy because, incredibly, Pope Francis visited there last year.
Since I have not yet been to either of the noted archaeological sites in the area, Chan Chan or La Huaca de la Luna, I’m planning to stay in the area another night after this one. I’ll go back to Trujillo in the morning, get a hostel there, go see some adobe pyramids, and then the day after, move on down the coast. Another factor in my delay is that the next stop is Lima, and I feel in my bones a deep reluctance to tackle a mega-city. But there’s really no way around it; to skip Lima would mean crossing the Andes again, and travel up there is painstakingly slow.
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Trujillo again, May 11
This morning I was able to remove myself from the tranquil melancholia of Huanchaco. Packed up my tent and paid the bill for the two nights I spent in the garden at the bottom of the cliffs. Caught a bus back to the big city, and as I walked through the centro and plaza, decided on my second time around that I like this place. Perhaps I was just grateful for something familiar, a place I had been before.
I was not trying to deal with the chaos of Casa de Conde again, and walked all the way across the center to a slightly more expensive hostel called El Mochilero that I’d seen on my way out a couple days before. Got a hostal bed, a little more expensive, but still only $8. Knowing that I had a long way to go this day, I was in and out in twenty minutes, just time to make a sandwich and pack a day bag.
Walked back across the centro to find a combi for Huaca de la Luna. I’d chosen this site this over the more famous Chan Chan because this was the lesser-traveled, and all original construction, where CC has been fully reconstructed. It was thirty minutes ride south out of the city in a van that at first was packed, but by the end was only three of us.
La Huaca de la Luna is one of two large adobe pyramids that are all that remain of the ancient city of Cerro Blanco. Situated under the volcanic peak of the same name, in the river valley of the Rio Moche, green amidst barren coastal desert, this was the capital of the Moche people who dominated the northern coast of Perú between 100 and 700 CE. The other, larger pyramid, La Huaca del Sol, has been devastated by the elements, significantly looted during the colonial period, and has not been excavated. This site is not much-visited, and it is incredible. Perhaps my favorite archaeological site I’ve seen.
I moved quickly through the museum, looking at impressive artifacts: masterful ceramics decorated with naturalistic faces and striking depictions of sacred beings; colorful ceremonial clothing, tapestries, weapons and such. Then it was the appointed hour for the included tour. The only other person wandering the museum was a Welsh young woman named Holly, and our guide was a middle-aged Peruana with a lot of eye makeup named Eva. She spoke some English, but would often switch into Spanish, unsatisfied with her explanation. We walked around to the back of this massive pyramid, maybe 300 feet in width by 100 feet tall, all constructed of hand-made adobe bricks.
The oldest part of the temple dates to about 100 CE, and was decorated in colorful religious images in relief. Every 75 years or so, the structure was entirely covered with a ten-foot thick layer of adobe, and another, larger, nearly identical block pyramid was constructed around it. In all, six pyramids were built like a Russian doll, one on top of the other. Archaeologists aren’t sure why they did this; perhaps to honor a new king, to give honor and tribute to the gods, or to reflect changes in religious focus.
When the Moche covered their temples in mud brick, they were unknowingly sealing them for posterity, and preserving all the art and imagery. Most ancient temples were not plain stone or mud; they were designed and painted with religious iconography (with the Incas being a notable exception). In every site I’d seen, the passage of time has worn these images away, but at La Huaca de la Luna, because they were buried, you can see 1500 year old art in full color, providing a deeper view of their culture.
Excavations have exposed four of the interior temples, so you can walk inside and see whole walls full of repeated images. Most of these are of their primary God, Ayapec, called by Eva “the All-Knowing”, and also “the Decapitator” because in some of the images he is shown beheading human victims with a knife. Across the different layers of the pyramid, the depictions vary in style and detail, but typically he has wide eyes, feline fangs, tentacles coming from his head, and holds a staff with the head of a serpent. Elsewhere he is shown as a two headed spider. A nightmare deity. The culture and religion were very much concerned with the vagaries of La Niña, when the rivers would dry up, and El Niño, when it would rain constantly, and the area would flood. These periods required human sacrifice to appease the wide-eyed tentacled god.
The greatest warriors would engage in ritual combat, and the losers were stripped, bound, and purified. In ceremonies held at the platform directly under the volcano, they would be killed by blunt force, or their throats cut. It is believed their blood was given to the god, and their bodies thrown down over the rocks at the top and back of the site. Many images show warriors carrying the clothing and weapons of vanquished opponents, of near-naked prisoners being led with bound hands.
Down below, where the common people would gather to see the ministrations of high priests above, was this incredible pictorial structure, one of the most striking pieces of art I have encountered. Perhaps it was a calendar; maybe a depiction of their cosmology, but it was this ordered maelstrom of a thousand images that reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch. This was entirely different from the rest of the art at the site. An ocean of mysterious but kinder beings swimming together in this chaotic constellation. For a long time, I stood looking at it from twenty feet away, trying to process this surreal vision.
Apparently the abandonment of this site coincided with a severe climactic disruption, some thirty years of flood followed by thirty years of drought. It is thought that people lost their faith in the priests and the god who was supposed to protect them in exchange for sacrifice. A new temple was built higher up the slope of the volcano, but that too was abandoned. Soon after, the new center of Chan Chan rose up twenty miles north, led by a different ethnic group with their gods in ascendance, that lasted all the way to Inca times.
After the tour was over, and I had given Eva a modest tip for her time, I asked if I could stay up at the site, to soak in the feeling. She said it was fine, and her and Holly walked back down. I climbed to the top again, gazed at the grey-white volcano, could feel exactly why the ancients had considered this mountain sacred. Looked out over the valley at dusk, imagining the once massive city below me, only a tiny bit of which has been excavated.
Took one more trip through the pyramid, an eerie and uncanny feeling being alone inside, me and thousands of images of the angry god. Eventually I made my way back to the museum, to look at the exhibits with a little more time. Of all the wild things I saw today, maybe the craziest experience came in my second trip through the museum. To express its significance, I have to go back two weeks, to when I was camping at Rumi Huilco outside Vilcabamba in the south of Ecuador.
While drinking Ayahuasca, an increasingly popular activity for spiritually seeking tourists, doesn’t really appeal to me, there is another sacred ceremonial substance in this region which has been on my mind. There is a cactus native to the Andes called San Pedro, or Pachanoi in the indigenous tradition, from which a type of mescaline can be extracted. It grows in the dry mountains above Rumi Huilco, and there are stern warnings that removing any plants from the reserve is against the law.
The consumption of this cactus has been part of traditional ceremonies in South America for a very long time; referential art and traces of cactus have been found in sites of the Chavin culture dating back to 1400 BCE. I knew that there was a hotel outside Vilcabamba that offered San Pedro ceremonies, but I didn’t feel drawn to that. If I was going to take part in ancient indigenous ceremonies, I’d like it to be a little more authentic than what I imagined at a hotel with a bunch of gringo tourists.
Beyond that, at this point I don’t want to seek out this kind of experience. It would take a lot for me to consume a powerful hallucinogenic substance. It would have to be very clear that the universe was aligning to offer me the right circumstance; I would have to feel called. Though I’d heard tell of San Pedro all the way since Guatemala, it was when I was in Vilcabamba that I really first heard that call.
One night while I was sleeping on the ground at Rumi Huilco, I had this vivid dream where I was at a party in a big city apartment. Among all the partygoers there was this indigenous man standing against the wall, in a full ceremonial dress I’d never seen before, made of orange, yellow and green feathers, a rectangular area around his nose and eyes painted in black.. Everyone else at the party was dressed normally, and this man was staring directly ahead, like a guard, a soldier. At some point, I asked someone next to me who that was, and they said, “Oh, that’s San Pedro.” “Like the cactus?” “Yes, the same one.” And right at that moment he looked right at me from across the room, and nodded his head in some expression of shared understanding. I knew in the morning when I woke up that I had been called.
Back at the museum, I came across a glass case containing a ceremonial outfit I had overlooked the first time. The robe was made all of feathers in brilliant color. It was exactly the one I’d seen in my dream. I parsed out what the plaque said in ornate Spanish: this was the robe worn by priests at this temple, when they would eat the sacred plant known as San Pedro. I don’t know how to make sense of all this, but it is clear I should be looking for the opportunity to take part in a ceremony.
Took a combi back to the city, where I got a Chifa dinner. The Aeropuerto Especial, an everything-goes Peruvian variation on Chinese food: wok-cooked fried rice mixed with angel hair noodles, some meager vegetables, beef, chicken, pork and shrimp. Drank a chicha morada, a drink they were probably drinking in the heyday of La Huaca, and wrote about fifteen hundred year old religious art. Just a normal day in Perú.
