Trujillo

Just Getting There

The flight from Lima to Trujillo is less than an hour but, because we departed on the night before the 4-day Easter weekend, our ride to the airport took two hours. We made the flight only by running through the airport, me arriving at the gate carrying my shoes after security as Jen called out "We're here! We're here." as they were about to shut the door. The poor lady I sat next to must have been horrified; I was all sweaty, with luggage all akimbo.

Part of the stress was that our taxi-driver seemed woefully unfamiliar with the system of back streets and shortcuts that make driving in Lima bearable. He drove with Google maps open on his phone, at one point getting us stuck at an intersection with the Panamerica Highway. Sometimes at intersections here, cars spiral at cross-purposes, so close together that finally no one can move forwards or backward. That's what happened to us and, like polar ice closing in around a boat, we were frozen in place. Finally, a random hero jumped out of the shotgun seat of a different taxi and started directing traffic himself. When he was done, he ran back but mistook our taxi's empty shotgun seat as his and tried to get in our car. Our flustered driver must have thought we were being hijacked, until finally the guy outside must have noticed that ours was a car full of gringos.


Trujillo
As with so many cities along the Peruvian coast, Trujillo sits on fertile flats, at the mouth of a canyon that funnels the waters from the Andes down. Much of the town was unremarkable, but in the colonial center we found our hotel situated on the pretty central plaza, ringed by brightly colored façades with ornate white entryways. The neighborhood is dotted with old, domed churches and Moorish wooden balconies jutted out from many buildings. It is not particularly a tourist destination, though what tourists there are all come through the plaza at some point. Cars honk while ladies push little carts from which you can buy boiled quail eggs, or mix-and-match various styles of canchitas (Perú's un-popped version of popcorn). White beans seem to be a local product and a kind of cebiche is made with it (lime juice, diced cilantro, salt), and some old ladies sold this from big sacks and people would walk down the street eating it from little sandwich bags.

Our first morning, we walked around the center of town. The whole Easter week is Semana Santa (Holy Week) and each day includes different activities for the devoted. We wandered into a church after a Holy Thursday service, watching people festoon the large gilded altar with hydrangeas or stand in line for confession or ritually wash the crucifix icon. The crucifix icon and the Mary icon play a big role in all the week's festivities. Starting on Holy Friday, ladies in mourning black will follow Mary around the processions, later changing into colorful clothes in time for the 3am Easter morning raising of the Christ icon.

After looking in on the church, we found a shop recommended to us as a good place for the local specialty of hand-worked leather boots. I pointed at some boots and asked if he had them in my size and perhaps not with 3-inch soles. "Come back Saturday." was his response. Jen found a pair she loved but also flipped through a huge catalog, pointing at a pair and asking if he could make those. "Come back Saturday." And though we had to check back a few extra times, we really did have custom-ordered boots 2 days later…for half what they cost in stores. Poking around some more we stumbled upon a pet store, clearly known as the place for black-market puppies because people milled around out front with puppies in bags and baskets.We picked up some stuff for Carter's goldfish and moved on.

Huanchaco
We got ourselves 12km out of town to the local beach/fishing village, where we enjoyed a fabulously fresh cebiche. I almost had to say something when we witnessed a French lady at the neighboring table send back her cebiche because it was "not cooked". "Not good!" she said in a huff. Huanchaco keeps several of the traditional reed boats used since ancient times to take fisherman out past the surf. We almost took a ride on one, but opted instead to dig in the sand and then buy a $1 line and hook and try our luck fishing off the pier. The taxi driver who promised to pick us up for our return to Trujillo at 5pm stood us up, so we saved some cash by squishing into one of the combi vans that troll around picking up passengers.

Otuzco
Very early got ourselves out to a taxi that took us to the bus stop to go a town called Otuzco. The drive takes you 75km up from the dusty coastal flats of Trujillo, through fields and fields of sugarcane, until the farmland narrows and you start the 8,500 climb along a river canyon. The bus ride has some thrills and chills and seeing a truck flipped on its side did not help. But after winding up and up, after the hills turn from crusty brown to velvet green, we finally arrived in Otuzco. We came because a couple of Peace Corps volunteers are there and both were playing apostles in the town's Good Friday passion play. As with all rural areas in the Andes, the ladies wear hats distinctive to their community. In Otuzco, it is a tall straw weave with a huge scoop of a brim, like a cowboy hat with more swoop. We were a half hour past when the the volunteer told us to arrive, but 2 hours early for the actual start time. We found are way up the cobbled streets to the main square and got Jen a very tasty chicken-noodle soup for a late breakfast. We also had a couple of coffees: instant Nescafé, the sad truth being that in a country with some of the world's best coffee, in many places it is almost impossible to get anything but instant. The time went quickly, we just milled around the plaza people-watching. There were the ladies in their big hats, their men with baseball caps and buttoned shirts and slacks – all with muddy shoes from the dirt tracks coming in from the surrounding hillsides. Carter and his fair curls got stares, but the celebration brings people from all over and I watched as a couple of mountain ladies laughed/stared in amazement at a big muscle guy.

The players moved along several stations set around the square, while the crowd pressed and followed them, and my height advantage over the typical Peruvian meant I was able to see more than most. After Jesus breaks bread, after he sees all the local bigwigs and things get bloody, he finally picks up the cross and drags it out of the square accompanied by Roman guards on donkeys, with periodic floggings. We followed along, realizing that the ultimate destination for the final scene was up on the hillside above town. Climbing uphill, cutting through some fields, we came upon Judas hanging from a tree before arriving at Calvary. Here were lots and lots of people waiting, with vendors selling pastries and sweet peanuts and even cebiche in plastic cups. So many of us in the crowd were eating when the final crucifixion occurred.

We found Melvin and Oscar, the volunteers, and took them to lunch at a restaurant right on the square. Jennifer was halfway through her lunch when we realized she had completely forgotten about Good Friday and, in spite of lunching with 2 of the apostles, ordered steak. Perhaps that's why it was so tough and dry while my fish and crab soup was fantastic. Being there with the volunteers, I got a sense of what it must be like for them  living for 2 years in a small town. One man came up to Oscar to pay back a loan, while Melvin was a little uncomfortable because also in the restaurant was his original host-mother with whom things had ended badly. Later, Melvin took us for a short visit to his new host family, complete with a pet deer that was frisky like a dog, butting Carter in the chest.

Chan Chan
Back in Trujillo, we were up Saturday morning to join a tour out to the ruins of the immense and ancient adobe city of Chan Chan. Trujillo is known for it's republican, rebellious spirit (it was the first Peruvian city to declare independence from Spain), and this heritage may go back to the Chimú people, the builders of Chan Chan. The Chimú became important around 900 A.D. ruled a large swath of coast for many centuries until the sun-worshipping Inca came around 1460 A.D., conquering the moon-worshipping Chimú in a contest so bitter that the Chimú abandoned their 20 sq. km. metropolis. When the Spaniards showed up, Chan Chan was empty, but there were remnants of the Chimú more than happy to help turn the tables on the Inca.

The ruins themselves are visible halfway along the road to the beach, a maze of eroded adobe walls that must look like a waffle-iron from the air. There are several ruins of palaces, the size of several football fields, though, and these have walls up to 60ft tall which were smoothed and carved with intricate patterns and geometric pictographs. The palace we toured included a large area dug down to the water table, creating a lake within the walls. Each Chimú headman had his own palace with his own tomb ready…here, the tomb is surrounded by 40 smaller tombs where the headman's concubines were put after their sacrifice, so they could go into the afterworld with him.

There is a gruesome footnote to the history of Chan Chan. In the 1930s, continuing the local penchant for rebellion, Trujillo was a center of leftist resistance. Things flared into armed conflict in the city and, after the APRA (the rebel group) killed several military prisoners, the army took 2000–6000 "aprista" rebels out somewhere in the Chan Chan ruins and executed them, leaving the stench of corpses to waft into Trujillo for months.

I split off from Jen and Carter for a bit, finding myself trying crab cebiche before rejoining them for a trip to see Rio 2 at the mall. Carter is, afterall, an 8yr-old. He was a trooper, not complaining during the passion play and even getting interested in the ruins.

Easter
The Easter bunny, it turns out, did hide eggs for Carter. He hid them around the hotel pool courtyard, much to the confusion of the gardner who was out there Easter morning. So we had a nice hunt for eggs, a last lunch in Trujillo, then a leisurely flight back to Lima.