“
’F’ said, ‘A Fish, if broiled, might cure, if only by the smell.”
Edward Lear - A Nonsense Alphabet
It finally felt as if I was on the move again. The Peruvian border had been the psychological turning point. Up until then, partly because I had spent so long in one country and partly because I had been repeating territory already covered, it hadn’t really felt as if I was getting anywhere. The feeling was rather ironic as the first thing we did in Peru was spend two days sitting on the beach at Punta Sal, doing nothing very much apart from socialising with the people from the north bound Encounter truck we met there and swapping tales of what lay ahead. At Huanchaco though, our next port of call things started to happen again - and what started to happen again in particular was visits to ruins. I had by now recovered from my ruins apathy, having not visited any since Tikal and that was months ago.
Huanchaco is a tiny coastal town famous for the surfboard like reed rafts that the local fishermen use, going out on them every morning at first light and returning a few hours later to stack them in racks on the beach to dry out in the fierce sun. Its a pleasant low key place with a few nice restaurants where the choice, as often as not, runs to fish, fish or fish - but it is very nice and very fresh fish. There are a number of interesting archaeological sites in the area and we were visiting two of them Chan Chan and the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon.
Our guide for the morning was Clara whose spoke heavily accented English with enough Spanish words interspersed to make concentration necessary. Chan Chan is the largest adobe city in the world but it’s all but invisible from the road because, being made of mud it is the same colour as its surroundings. Clara led us into it and around the vast maze of courtyards and alleyways and the remains of temples and streets. It truly was a maze. Without a guide we would have been lost in minutes and probably still wandering round there to this day. Alleys turned corners and dead-ended unexpectedly. Promising looking gaps in the walls of a courtyard led only to r smaller ones with no obvious exits other than the one we had entered by. As we walked around I started to get the vague feeling that it all looked a little too well preserved. I couldn’t get it out of my head that for a city built by the Chimu people six hundred years ago and made entirely out of mud it seemed remarkably well preserved. In the Ciudadela de Tschudi Clara pointed out a row of relief mouldings on the wall. It stretched the whole length of the perimeter, around an area bigger than a football pitch. After several minutes describing the historical significance of the carvings and the symbolism employed she pointed at a small section no more than about a yard long and confirmed my suspicions.
“This,” she said “Is original, the rest” - an expansive gesture encompassed the whole square, “is reconstruction.”
Credit where it’s due. As reconstructions go it was all very good, extremely convincing apart from the problem of not looking ruined enough but I’m never very happy with the concept of reconstruction. It feels like cheating.
From Chan Chan we moved on to the two pyramids of the Moche, Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna, exchanging Clara for her husband Michael, an archaeologist from Birmingham whose accent made me feel quite homesick. He had, he told me, made excavations in Papua New Guinea and Australia but for the last eleven years had based himself here, leading tours around the various sites in the area and trying to convey his love of the subject to people who would probably never set foot inside these temples again. He was successful. His enthusiasm for his subject and his droll sense of humour was infectious keeping everyone’s attention in a way that only Gorilla had previously managed way back at Teotuhican in Mexico.
At the site it was immediately clear that this was not reconstruction. The opposite was true, this was an active site where, Michael explained, each new visit found a new treasure that had been unearthed. This time he enthused wildly over a new section of wall painting that was covered with a canvas on bamboo poles and hadn’t been cleared the last time he was there. As is very often the case the pyramid had been built on top of a previous structure which had in turn been built on a yet earlier one. Excavations had gone down through many levels and we went inside to look at the paintings and friezes that had been uncovered. Although these too were remarkably well preserved they were quite obviously original. Sections of earlier decoration could be made out where the later decoration had fallen away. It was, he explained quite a dilemma for the archaeologists. How could they discover information about the older, buried levels without destroying the later additions. How could they manage to preserve both the very ancient and the merely ancient when to get at the former would mean destroying the latter. The current decision was not to go further down, to preserve as much of the outer temple as possible. It was a decision I approved of.
After an entertaining couple of hours we left, running the gauntlet of a huge party of local school children just arriving for their visit who all seemed more fascinated by the long blonde hair of two of the women in the group than they were by the pyramids.
There was one more set of ruins in the most ruin packed day I have ever spent, the Temple of the Dragon which is also called the Temple of the Rainbow. This is in the Esperanzo district and was closed. Michael however wasn’t in the slightest deterred by this fact, striding in and persuading the watchman that we should be allowed to visit anyway. It’s a small temple surrounded with a bizarre set of stylised carvings depicting, so we were told, the story of a boy dragon meeting a girl dragon and getting together to produce little baby dragons. All very heart-warming and almost all reconstructed in the last few years after being destroyed by storm damage. The other wall in particular, which stands about twenty feet high showed a suspicious change of colour about two feet up from the ground. Michael confirmed that it had been rebuilt although as much as possible of the collapsed structure had been used in the process.
We walked up the ramp onto the top and looked out over the city of Trujillo, quite a panoramic view although closer to hand, looking down on the temple itself it was even clearer from this position that it had been rebuilt. We headed back down and out, returning to our Huanchaca camp site. Three ruins in one day. It was a new record.
On the way to Lima we passed through a string of forgettable towns separated by long bleak periods of desert. Only one left a lasting impression and that an entirely nasal one. If there is ever a competition for the smelliest place on Earth then my vote would go to Chimbote. How anyone can live there is utterly inconceivable. Miles before we passed the first signpost for it we were aware of its presence. The smell of rotting and rancid fish was overpowering. As we closed in with the windows and doors of the truck tightly shut it became almost unbearable. We were gagging in our seats at the stench of it all. In the town centre people seemed to be going about their business as if nothing was wrong.
“Perhaps,” someone suggested, “They get used to it and don’t notice.”
It scarcely seemed possible but what other explanation could there be? We drove out of town and a new, even more unpleasant note was added to the melange of odours. The city dump was burning rubbish which made the previous smells pale by comparison. Once clear of it we opened all the windows to allow the ventilation to shift the lingering foulness but it was an uphill struggle and had hardly been completed when we reached Lima and had to close them for security.
Lima is not my favourite city. Having spent time there before I was all too aware of how dangerous it can be. Perhaps the chances of getting injured are slight, although I wouldn’t bet on that, but the chances of getting robbed are really quite high. We drove into the outskirts in the late afternoon and before we had reached our hotel had already managed it. As we moved at a snails pace through the rush hour traffic someone at the back of the truck shouted out
“Stop, there’s someone on the roof.”
Fi pulled the truck over to the side of the road and those nearest the door got out to check. It was already too late. The tarpaulin had been slashed and several items including the bag with most people’s boots and some sleeping mats and a someone’s souvenir carpet, had already gone.
Apart from the crime rate Lima wasn’t anything like I remembered it. I was there for a few days around Christmas in 1994 but I recognised nothing. I puzzled over this. Surely in five years it couldn’t have changed beyond recognition. Perhaps I had imagined it and hadn’t been there at all. Perhaps this was the first onset of some weird traveller’s sickness in which the places that I have been to are so numerous that they are lost somewhere down the back of the drawers in the filing cabinet of my mind. I was getting quite carried away before the more prosaic solution occurred to me. Perhaps I had been to a different section of it. The guide books and a city map soon put me right. Lima is a large and strange city. It contains nearly a third of Peru’s total population and had in ‘94 an unemployment rate of about sixty per cent. I don’t know what the current figure is but from the number of people out on the streets of Lima it doesn’t seem to be dramatically improved. The city is divided into districts and therein lay the explanation of my memory lapse. When I had been here before I had been down in the posh district, Miraflores, a seaside resort area which has some nice hotels and restaurants and the second most polluted and disgusting beach I have ever seen (the first being not far from Karachi in Pakistan - my whole body shudders involuntarily at the very memory of it). This time round I was downtown, right in the heart of the city, an area I had previously only gone through on a coach on my way to visit the dark and gloomy, though wonderfully ornate, cathedral. Walking about was neither as bad as I’d remembered or feared and there were plenty of restaurants including several branches of the splendidly named Mr. Koala. I had decided to visit the Museum of the Inquisition as it seemed a little out of the ordinary as museums go. As I arrived one of the couples from our trip Ian and Emma were hanging about on the steps waiting for a tour that was to begin shortly, and Beer managed to suppress his revolutionary instinct to join in with the demonstration that was going on across the square and join us. Apart from one other person who as far as I could tell spoke neither English nor Spanish we were the only people there. The Inquisition building was a large and fabulously decorated colonial building with carved mahogany ceilings and pillars. It has the feel of a church to it which considering the bloody and violent things that went on there in the name of religion is either appropriate or not depending on your view of things. A guide showed us around, and seemed - as far as I could tell - to be actually saying that the Inquisition hadn’t been all that bad really. Not too many people had been killed and the tortures weren’t all that barbaric and anyway they were guilty weren’t they so what was the problem. Those weren’t her actual words of course but certainly seemed to be the tone of it. It was all rather worrying, especially given that the half a dozen wax work recreations of scenes from the inquisition seemed more to agree with the popular blood thirsty image than her almost approving descriptions.
I left the museum wondering if we had been guided around by someone who was an isolated nut case or if that was the generally held opinion of the period. Still given the ease with which that thief had relieved us of our possessions and the lack of interest shown by the police when people had reported the crime I suppose she might have had a point. The rack and the iron maiden and the tiny airless cells below the palace might well have acted as a bit more of a deterrent than the current penalties.
