Chan Chan to Lima

An early wake up call, 5am came around and we all got up and put the tents down. I was on cook group so made some breakfast with the others, eggy toast and cereals. After cleaning up and putting all of the things into their designated areas on the truck we headed off for the lands of Chan Chan. The Chan Chan mud city was built in AD1300 . At the height of the Chimu Empire in Peru, Chan Chan contained about 10,000 structures made of mud. Pretty impressive sight to see.

Once our legs were tired from walking about the huge structures and looking at all the cool designs in the mud, we took a trip to the temple of the moon and the sun, in Spanish Las Huacas del Sol y de la Luna. These temples are 700 years older than Chan Chan ruins. The Huaca del Sol is Peru´s largest pre-Columbian structure, 140 million adobe bricks were used to build it. The temple was full of original drawings and muriels on the walls, with colours still intact.

We then hasd lunch in the car park with the sun blasting its heat onto our faces. This afternoon was spent on the truck making our way to our beach camp for the night which ended up being a deserted holiday beach strip only occupied by peruvians 2 months of the year.

We cooked pasta on this night and chilled out by the bonfire on the beach, watching the stars and talking about our life stories.

The next day we drove throught the peruvian desert, sand dunes, mountains and more sand to the capital of this amazing country, Lima. Lima is a huge city, shanty towns cover the local mountains and the entarance to the main city. We had a little trouble coming into the area where our hotel was as a few guys tried to get into the front cab only getting down by our tour leader Rachel trapping his fingers in the window. This city has a huge overpopulation problem and this has earned this`place a reputation as a polluted, frenetic and dangerous place. We were all alittle worried about what this city was going to bring.

On the way, Brendan sneaked through a red light..the police made us paid 20 Soles for the priviledge!

Today though, to our surprise was fantastic. We had beautiful weather and landed on a yearly ceremonial day for Senor de los Milagros. There was a huge procession of religious artifacts and priests and crosses through the main square and loud speakers with the sound of the ceremony inside the main cathedral.

There were thousands of people, dressed in purple, as well as military and police everywhere. After watching what was happening we made our way to the local monestry, Monesterio de San Francisco. This monestry has Catacombs underground with bones and skulls from religious people that wanted to be buried there back on the 16th century. It was an amazing building with muriels, tiles and paintings dating back to 1600AD.

Lima is full of beauitful buildings but is so mixed up with under development and poor people that it confuses most of its granduer.

Tomorrow we are off to sandboard down the huge dunes and sleep amongst the stars...