Chiclayo, Peru

Lalo here.

I've got some unplanned down time so I figured I'm make another post, because I'm sick of looking at my kindle.

We spend Monday night in Chiclayo, down the coast a ways from Mancora and then after walking all over Chiclayo on Tuesday, we boarded another night bus to Chachapoyas, back up in the mountains.

This section of the northern Peruvian Andes has a lot of significant ruins from Incan and pre-Incan times. We came to see (among other things) the ruins of Kuelap, what I understand to be the 2nd largest ruins in Peru. After a few days in Mancora, I was kind of eager to get off the "beaten path" and see some real Peru. Kuelap is hard to get to, there is not a huge tourist industry in Chachapoyas, and they don't appear to have any fancy hotels, so we seem to have left the hordes behind.

At any rate, I woke up Tuesday morning feeling a little off, but decided to power through and go see the sights. By the evening, I was starting to feel true nausea coming on. Long story short, if you are lying awake, sweating bullets, trying to get your mind off it because you think theres a reasonable chance you're going to throw up on this bus and you have another 6 hours to go and if you keep thinking about how shitty you feel, then you're definitely going to throw up, I highly recommend listening to Radiohead's new album on repeat until you get there. Radiohead, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sandersand Art Blakey all helped me get to a peaceful place where I could focus on the music and literally ride it out.

I spend all day pretty sick. Here, I'm rounding the corner on day 3 and I just ventured out to the mercado central for some bananas and oranges, so that's a good sign. 

We both acknowledged that with travellers diarrhea and ecoli and whatnot, its not a matter of if but of when, so I'm trying to just go with it. Atahualpa, for those wondering, was the Incan leader that the duplicitous Pizarro took captive, demanding the legendary ransom of a roomful of gold for his release. That took place in Cajamarca, the next town on our route, in 1532, so I figure this was Atahualpa's, not Montezuma's revenge.

At any rate, I convinced Maggie to go off on the day-trip tour to the 3rd (or 5th) highest waterfall in the world (depending on who you ask), rather than sit here with me, so here is my down time.

At any rate, I really enjoyed Chiclayo. I think its very much a pass-trhough city, so we got a lot of looks. I don't think Chiclayans are used to seeing two tall-ish, hapless gringos wandering their streets. The main square and Cathedrale de Chiclayo were gotgeous, but the two coolest things in Chiclayo we saw were the Mercado Central and the Paseo Yortuque. 

Paseo Yortuque was only built a few years ago. Its a walking tour of the history of the religion, Gods and culture of the Lambayeque region of northern Peru. Before the Incans conquered everything from southern Colombia to northern Chile, there were a lot of smaller empires. The walk had a series of statues of the Gods of these pre-Incan religions and they were awesome. I'll spare you the details and names, but the Iguana God was the mediator between the land of the dead and the land of the living because iguanas apparently live underground sometimes. The Crab God was the God of fishing and fishermen. 

A thousand years before Stan Lee invented Spider Man, there was Spider God

After Paseo Yortuque, we wandered north to the Mercado Central, which has a whole quadrant of it focused on brujas and magic. Burlap sacks of tree bark, roots, spices, powders, animal horns, special candles, coca leaf, staffs, daggers and wands. Lots of potions and teas for potency. It was pretty intense.

At any rate, I'm on the mend and the show must go on! Hopefully (but not assuredly) that was the worst bus experience I'll have in South America. Maybe I should have bought a candle or charm for that. I dunno. I just knocked on wood, so maybe that'll help.

But seriously, check out the new Radiohead album, Moon Shaped Pool