I'm not sure if it was the stick of fried chicken hearts I purchased from the side of the road, the vegetable soup which contained bits of meat, or the steak from the restaurant with dogs in the kitchen - either way, I experienced the worst 24 hours of my life this week.
It's swings and roundabouts though - although most of the meals in this country have the potential to kill you, you can buy powerful antibiotics on every street corner. My drug of choice was Ciprofloxacin and it has fixed me up nicely. The only reason I've heard of Ciprofloxacin is because, when travelling in Australia, I drove a French girl (with a kidney infection) to the doctors to buy some. When we got there he explained that she'd have to wait a few hours as they needed central authorisation from Canberra before prescribing the drug. You can actually buy it from some Internet cafes over here!
The last week has been a blast. After Huaraz I visited Huanchaco, a sleepy beach town with some great surf. After a couple of months of high-altitude cold nights it was nice to be somewhere with 35 degree sun-baked days and warm nights. I met a couple of German girls and two Swedish girls, and we were joined by my Bolivia travelling companion Annemarie, who was passing through on her way back to Lima.
I can't say I did anything particularly interesting in Huanchaco - surfing, lying on the beach, drinking on the rooftop terrace and, of course, playing Shit Head.
After saying goodbye to everyone in Huanchaco, I headed to the small town of Chachapoyas in the Northern highland region. The town (and the district) is named after the Chachapoyas people who inhabited the region between 500AD and 1,500AD. Chachapoyas means people of the clouds, not surprising since this area is covered in cloud forest. In case you don't know (I didn't) cloud forest is the term given to tropical forest regions covered in dense low-lying cloud. It sounds quite cool but from afar all you can see is cloud. And when you get inside the forest everything is damp.
What is cool though, is the fact that this whole region is peppered with ruins from both the Chachapoyans and the Incas (who later conquered them). There are about 20 major ruins in the region, most of which are still being excavated, and more are being discovered every year. It is like my village of Launton (which probably has about 1,000 people) being surrounded by 20 Stonehenges!
I spent 4 days in Chachapoyas. On day one I visited the controversial Gocta falls. How can a waterfall be controversial? Well it's kinda two waterfalls in one - there is a fall of about 200m, then a step, before another fall of about 500m.
This puts the waterfalls at either 717m or 490m high, depending on who you believe. I have therefore visited the 3rd or 16th highest waterfall in the world. Either way it was a good waterfall, and I am ranking 7th it in my top 10 waterfalls (take that World Waterfall Database).
Day two (and the night before) was food poisoning time. I felt so cold that I spent all day lying in a chair in the 35 degree sun wearing trousers, two jumpers, a hat, thick gloves and two scarfs. Everyone else was wearing shorts and flipflops - I looked ridiculous. At least I made some people laugh. I ate two pieces of cereal all day and drank about 5 litres of water.
On day three I still felt terrible, but hauled myself out of bed and visited the mountain-top citadel of Kuelap. Massive exterior stone walls containing more than four hundred buildings were built on the top of a mountain by the Chachapoyans over a period of about 1,000 years. The huge blocks of stone had to be carried up the side of the mountain from about 2km away - no mean feat as they each weigh about 200kg. Visiting Kuelap requires a bit of imagination - it is not as polished or restored as Machu Picchu, but the sheer size of the place really makes a big impression. It is estimated that the amount of stone used to build the complex could rival that of the Egyptian pyramids, and that 3,000 people lived within the walls.
There are ingenious defence mechanisms too - entrance passages get thinner as you enter the complex so that any attackers were funneled into an easily defensible single-file line, and they have huge steps to slow attackers down.
My final day was spent visiting caves and some really interesting Chachapoyan sarcophaguses (or whatever the plural of sarcophagus is). My companions were Japanese and Brazillian girls and a Swiss guy. We headed into the pitch black caves and saw some bones of Chachapoyan kings that had been buried there.
The rest of the tour was supposed to be spent seeing rock formations in the cave. It wasn't that easy. About 100m in, the Swiss guy decided he didn't want to go on any further (it was very wet and muddy), so we left him sitting on a rock and would pick him up on our way back. We carried on until the end of the cave, which was about 500m, looking at the huge stalactites/stalagmites and ducking lots of bats.
At the exact point, our guide's light ran out of batteries. Of course he's got some spare...oh, no, he hasn't. It wasn't even possible to see your hand in front of your face, let alone navigate back through the slippery mud and deep pools of water. In the end we had to use the screen-light of two small Nokia phones!! Swiss guy had been waiting so long that he assumed we'd exited another way and was nowhere to be seen when we finally made it back to his rock. We found him at the front of the cave in a bad mood, he got over it though.
The sarcophaguses were awesome. Perched up high on the sheer cliff face are six adobe figures, each housing the mummified body of an important person, along with all their best possessions. It looked like quite a fun climb up to the figures...with ropes and a harness. I can't imagine how the people who built them worked away up there without falling off.
We headed back to Chachapoyas and saw a nice rainbow. Next stop for me will be Ecuador, but I think I am going to have fun getting there.... Here are some more pics.
Local Huanchaco fisherman use these surfboards made from reeds to bring in their catch.
The route to the waterfalls was not exactly an advert for good health & safety practices.
Bones of important people stored inside the walls of Kuelap - when I die, I want to be buried in a wall.
Beautiful stonework in Kuelap.
An attempt at a reconstruction of one of the Chachapoyan round houses. The guide actually said (I quote), "This is a rubbish reconstruction by a Canadian. The roof is too big and the walls are going to fall down. Canadians can't get anything right in Peru". OK...
The remains of many round houses - each has a whole for storage, two stones for grinding corn and an area for guinea pigs.
A mummy from inside one of the sarcophaguses. They are always put in the foetal position. I don't think I want to be in this position when I'm buried in my wall.
No comments:
Post a Comment