Woohoo!
This is quite a long mail so you may want to go grab a cup of tea. God, I'm missing tea - there's no decent tea around here!
I finally reached Peru, at 4am on Wednesday 22nd June. I spent a few days in the city of Chiclayo with 2 German lasses looking some of the pre-Inca ruins. The Incas didn't get to the North of Peru until very late in their conquering and weren't there very long before they themselves were conquered by another culture. Not sure which one at the moment, that's something to find out. We went up to Tucume to see a site where there are lots of pyramids and went to a museum about the Sipan people who built them. My Spanish is getting better, although it takes me an age to read the information. I think I stayed in the museum for nearly 2 hours!
After Chiclayo I took the only bus to Chachapoyas, a town in the Northern highlands. I’ve been travelling with an English guy, Andrew, for about a week now and the two of us arrived, feeling very sleepy, at 5am. The town of Chachapoyas is named after a pre-Inca tribe who lived in the cloud forest around this area. Chachapoyas translates as 'cloud people’ or ‘people of the cloud'. Interestingly it is thought that these people resembled us westerners rather than the natives of South America.
We took a 4-day tour to see Pre-Inca ruins, trekking around Chachapoyas. It was amazing. The first day we went to see Karajia, which are sarcophagi and Andrew managed to get some amazing photos. The sarcophagi are the burial places of the most important people. Above them are the skulls of their enemies. We next took a car along a dirt track (a dirt track that no English person would take their car down) before walking to our digs. These were little more than mud huts half way down the valley. We arrived and started to make tea and chicken soup. After tea we tried to fish but caught nothing, so our breakfast the next day consisted of bread, jam and left-over chicken soup.
The next day we walked 30km-ish, to our next digs seeing more ruins on the way. These Chachapoyas were ingenious people. All their houses were round (unlike the Incas who build rectangular houses) and any straight walls were built in a sort of wave that made them anti-seismic – they could withstand earthquakes. Wow I hear you say. And another Wow is that our guide who was called Janet could only speak Spanish yet I spent 4 days picking up all this stuff (Andrew's Spanish is really crap).
With aching legs by day 3, we had to ride mules. Twenty painful kilometers! We finally got to the ridge that was our cue to start heading downhill to Choctamal, a village where we were hoping to stay the night. Janet had to nip up to a different village to see her family so we were left on a doorstep in the middle of nowhere. Soon the family of the shack arrived, the son aged 10, his back laden with bags and the daughter aged 2 who had walked all the way with him (something a 2-year-old in Britain wouldn't do). We found out that the boy's name was Elvis (pronounced Elbis) and the little girl was Judy. To say that there is no 'J' in the Spanish language, there're loads of people whose name begin with 'J'. We also met a Jessica. After much deliberation, we ended up staying in Choctamal’s most expensive hotel. It had hot water and flushing toilets. Woohoo!!!!
The last day we visited Kuelap, a very well preserved pre-Inca city. Apparently when it has been cleaned up and thoroughly researched it will be the next Manchu Pichu! If you want to find out there's info on the web, I think the address is www.kuelap.org.
I'll try and email some photos at some point, I'm still pondering on how to get them developed, I've heard that the developing process in the whole of South America isn't good and they're probably going to ruin the photos. Also I'm not sure about sending undeveloped film home. Will they be x-rayed at the airport and will that ruin the film?
Any suggestions would be fantastic.
Love ya all,
Jenxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
