Where's Andrew

MANCORA, CHICLAYO & CAJAMARCA, PERU – SEPT. 24 TO OCT. 4

Shane, Seleka and I caught a taxi from the Ecuador boarder to Tumbes about a 20 minute drive away. In Tumbes, we caught a small passenger van about 2 hours south along the coast on the Pan American Highway to Mancora. We get to Mancora at about 4:00PM and it is a small surfing and fishing town with a beautiful beach. Our van is met by a number of guys on motor taxis wanting to take us to various hotels and hostels. While Shane stays with our luggage, Seleka and I go with one of the motor taxis and visit 3 or 4 hostels before finding one we like at a good price (my private room is $10US per night).

By the time we get settled into our rooms, it is time for dinner. None of us had lunch while travelling and we find a nice local restaurant and have Cerviche (raw fish marinated in lime) for dinner. Afterwards, we spend a relaxing evening playing cards while having a few local beers at the hostel. The next day is a leisurely day exploring the town, walking the beach and watching the kite surfers. It is quite windy and it is amazing how fast the kite surfers go and how high they jump off of the waves and we watch them for a couple of hours. We also want to book a day of fishing and we find a local guy with a boat and arrange to fish for 4 hours the next morning at 6:00AM for about $33US each.

The next morning, the motor taxi that we had arranged to pick us up does not show up. We find another motor taxi but we are not sure where to go to meet the boat. After a detour through town asking a lot of people where our captain keeps his boat, we finally find him at the commercial fishing dock but it is now 6:30AM and we are 30 minutes late. His boat is a small 5 metre wooden boat with a 20 horse outboard engine. We spend the first 30 minutes trolling along the shore south from town and I have 1 good strike but no other action. We then drop anchor about 1 km from shore and start fishing with hand lines with chunks of fish.

Raft Used by Local Fisherman

Within 20 minutes we have caught half a dozen small fish (about 10cm long). They are all the same type and we are thinking these are bait for other fishing but the captain speaks a form of Spanish that none of us can understand so we are not sure.

Over the next couple of hours, we move to a couple of other nearby locations and continue the same type of fishing but now we are catching slightly bigger fish of the same type around 20cm long. By the time our 4 hours has finished, we have caught more than 20 fish with the biggest being 21 or 22cm. This is not what we expected but at least the weather was really calm and we have been watching lots of Boobies, Pelicans and Sea Lions all morning. Once we get back to the dock, one of the local guys cleans the 6 largest fish for us. We then have fish for lunch and dinner that day, they are not the biggest fish I have caught but they taste good.

Watching the kite surfers has really excited Shane and Seleka, so the next morning they book 4 days of kite surfing lessons. I am going to head to Cajamarca in the northern highlands but it is over 12 hours by bus so I decide to go to Chiclayo which is 6 hours south of Mancora on the coast. Shane, Seleka and I talk about meeting up somewhere in a week or 2, maybe Huaraz which is in the central highlands. My bus is supposed to leave at noon but it is over 1.5 hours late. Then about 3 hours into the drive, we get stopped at one of the many security police checks along the highway near Piura. One of the bus staff, a woman, immediately comes from up front and sits next to the rear bathroom. A minute later, a policeman comes on the bus and one of the first things he does is look into the bathroom at the back of the bus where he finds a bunch of small tanks full of gasoline. He starts to ask questions of the people at the back of the bus and he has a lengthy conversation with the woman from the bus company.

The bus is then driven off the highway into a residential neighborhood with the policeman on board. A bunch of police are waiting and everyone is taken off the bus and they collect passports and ID from everyone on the bus. We learn that the gas on the bus is from Ecuador (where gas is less than ½ the price) and it has been illegally brought over the boarder as the bus originated in Ecuador that morning. The woman from the bus company tries bribing the police to no avail and the bus driver is taken away to the police station. We sit there for 4.5 hours with no bathrooms, restaurants or stores nearby waiting. I find out the woman on the bus talking to the police is a senior person from the bus company and I try to get her to give me a partial refund or a ticket for the morning bus to Chiclayo so I can stay the night in Piura before continuing on in the morning but she refuses.

Sipan

Finally around 9:00PM, the bus driver is brought back to the bus and we get on our way. We arrive in Chiclayo around midnight and I catch a taxi to the Hospedaje Concordia where I get a room for $18US. I am also so happy to see a pizzeria open across the street as I am starving because I have not eaten since I left Mancora. I decide to spend the next day in Chiclayo looking for a new computer. Chiclayo is a fairly large city just over 400,000 in population so I´m hopeful I can find something suitable. The only tablets I can find in the local stores are I-Pads and the Samsung Galaxy and neither will suit my needs.

I do find an ASUS dealer and find out that ASUS Peru is out of stock of their tablets and new stock is scheduled to arrive in 2 weeks but there may be some stock in the larger cities like Lima or Trujillo.

The next day, I carch a city bus to the nearby ruins of Sipan. I never would have found the right bus if it was not for a local buy who spent an hour helping me find the right bus. Sipan dates to about 200AD and consists of some crumbling pyramids that was used to bury nobility and religous leaders. There is a small museim and rhe ruins to expliore and I am on site for a couple of hours.



Cajamarca Plaza Aramas Church

  The next morning, I catch a 9:00AM bus to Cajamarca which is 6 hours away. The terrain along the northern coast of Peru is desert with sand everywhere and cacti lining the highways. The bus winds through the desert for a couple of hours before climbing into the mountains. It is still very arid in the mountains and the terrain reminds me of the southern Okanagan Valley in BC. I arrive in Cajamarca around 4:00PM and get a room at the Hostal Becerra for $10US.

Cajamarca has played a significant role in the history of modern day Peru. This is where the Spanish conquistador Pizarro and his men (only



Cajamarca Plaza Armas

 about 200 Spaniards) ambushed and captured Atahualpa, the Inca emperor. In the battle in the town´s main square, over 5000 Inca warriors were killed but not a single Spaniard was lost. Atahualpa was held for several months in Cajamarca while his people brought riches from the empire trying to buy his release. Once it became clear that the Spaniards were not going to release him, he plotted a revolt which the Spaniards caught wind of and he was executed in the main plaza.

Peru has a large Chinese population and that evening, I have a nice dinner at one of the many Chinese Restaurants near the Plaza de Armas.



Rocks Formation Near Cumbe Mayo

 The next day I explore the town, work on posting some blogs at an internet café and I book a tour for the next morning to Cumbe Mayo. Cumbe Mayo is located 20km southwest in the mountains above Cajamarca. It is famous for the 9km of aqueducts built over 2500 years ago. The area is also known for some unique rock formations left behind after the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.

The bus ride to Cumbe Mayo takes about an hour and the country side is beautiful. Just after we cross the continental divide, we get to where our walking tour starts. But things don´t start the way I would like as I get bitten by a dog as I´m

taking a picture. Luckily the bite just barely breaks the skin of my shin and the dog ran off before I could give it a kick. We walk through some amazing rock formations for a couple of kilometers before getting to a small valley where the aqueduct starts. The part of the duct that we see runs for 4km to the continental divide. There is only a 2 metre height difference over this 4kms and the duct is carved out of the valley´s volcanic stone for most of the way. There are even a few low points where above ground rock bridges are built for the duct. Considering that only stone tools were available to the people who made it, the aqueduct is amazing. The valley where the duct begins was supposed to



Cumbe Mayo Aqueduct

 be sacred as was the water in it. The aqueduct brought this water to a town located where present day Cajamarca is located but it was only used for religious ceremonies and not for drinking or irrigation.

During the tour, my camera was really acting up. The 4 months in the humidity of Central America really took its toll on my camera. There are some fairly large round dead spots of the camera´s LCD screen which fortunately do not affect the pictures. But today, it would not focus properly on the landscape and the image on the LCD would go in and out of focus for a few seconds and then the screen would go blank and a message would display telling be to turn the camera on and off again. Sometimes this would work and I could take pictures and sometimes I would have to turn the camera on and off multiple times before it would finally reset. I hope this is not the beginning of the end as my Panasonic camera was expensive when I bought it a couple of years ago and a nice new replacement 10X zoom camera will be expensive.

While on the tour of Cumbe Mayo, a German traveller told me about a town to the north called Chachapoyas where some of the best ruins in all of Peru are supposed to be located. That evening, I read about this town in my guide book and it sound amazing. So, I decide to catch a bus there the next morning. I´m not sure when the bus departs so I head to the terminal around 7:00AM only to find that there is only 1 bus a day and it left at 4:20AM and it takes 12 hours to get there. So, I guess I´m staying another night but I get a hotel next to the bus terminal since my other hotel was a couple of kilometres away. I spend the day working on my blog and exploring more of the town. I´m pleased to see that my camera seems to be back to normal. I’m hoping it will last the trip but I kind of think it will likely die completely somewhere along the way.

I’m up just before 4:00AM the next morning. This is definitely the earliest bus yet that I have taken and it is pitch dark as the bus leaves. I´ve stocked up on food and drink for the 12 hour bus ride and I´m hoping the bus does not run late. I sleep for the first few hours but awake as the bus starts


Cajamarca

down into the deep canyon of the Rio Maranon Balsas. This canyon is huge and we descend for about 2 hours and more than 2000m to the river below. It is a narrow dirt road that twists and turns all the way down. There are many hairpin turns that the bus driver honks his horn around in case a vehicle is coming the other way. It takes even longer to go back up the other side of the canyon and the road is even worse. As we are going round some of the narrow corners, I look out my window and can´t see any road instead all I see is a drop that is often hundreds of metres to the ground below. There is also road work going on everywhere as most of the rock around the road is sandstone and it appears to be a non-stop job keeping the road passable. I´m glad it is not raining because



Road Through Canyon to Chachapoyas

 this road is the craziest road that I have ever seen and I can´t imagine driving it when it is wet.

Bye for now and more on Chachapoyas next time.