Road travel in Peru is best described as an ongoing game of chicken — when you’re on the second floor of a two story bus, in the first seats (the panorama seats) you spend a lot of time staring at oncoming semis, gripping your seat and cursing. And this is how we spent most of the week that would take us from Paracas on the coast of southern Peru, to Yurimaguas at the Amazonian headwaters.
After a jump to Lima, we tucked in for a mostly sleepless night for the long haul up the coast to Trujillo and Huanchaco. It would have been an uneventful crossing, except that I managed to leave the iPad on the bus. The hostel called the bus company for us, they searched it, found nothing. It’s ok it’s just a “thing”, but given that it was an expensive bus company, that we had assigned seats with all of our information connected to them… well I expected more. Was kind of a bad day for me and my opinions about people in general. As a consequence of this, post to the blog has gotten exceedingly more complicated, and we spend hours in Internet cafes making up for it.
Short on time, as we have been for these last precious moments on the road, we booked another tour in a taxi, and spent the day ambling along the impressive and sprawling mud built coastal ruins of Chan-Chan and some smaller ruins within the sprawl of Trujillo.
Chan-Chan is vast — a pre-Colombian coastal city made of mud, built by a culture of moon worshippers, much of it crumbling poetically into the distances, but still so much of it holding strong and rich in details. How these buildings made of mud can endure the punishment of its coastal setting is entirely beyond me.
Still bruised from the iPad incident, we returned to the sea at Huanchaco, with its ever consistent surf, and I spent a few hours on a rented surfboard, communing with the seabirds, and quieting my mind. Lucy let me eat cake for dinner, and that pretty much took care of everything.
The bus inland to Chachapoyas was awful. Another overnight bus. Fearing another front seat fear-fest, we had our seats changed at the connection in Chiclaya… For the worst. We wound up next to a chemical toilet whose dialed up potency caused ones eyes to water and throat to burn… Seriously, my throat burned for 2 days.
We arrived in Chachapoyas at 5am, the sun still very far from rising, sleepless. This happens occasionally. You stay where you’re at till the sun comes up and people mill about — a solid strategy to avoid getting mugged. Well, the “bus station” didn’t really exist. Just an dark empty yard with yellow street lights. When an old taxi driver offered a ride, we took it, not really caring where we’d go, just as long as we weren’t there anymore. The hostel he took us too was booked, so the sleepy owner told us over the balcony, but the second place had room, and we slept away most of the morning.
Chachapoyas is nice! A friendly, white washed colonial affair with a beautiful town square, and surrounded by green hills and cloud forest. There’s little to do in the town itself but drink coffee and stuff your face at interval, and we spent much of our time doing what one usually comes for — the ruins at Kuelap and the third highest waterfall in the world, Gocta falls.
Kuelap was beautiful, huge, scenic, well preserved. Lonely Planet says it rivales Machu Picchu. I have to contest that, but it’s definitely nicer and more picturesque than most of the other ruins you’ll see. And it’s quite a bit different. It’s perched on a mountaintop, surrounded on all sides by the most remarkable green hills, stitched with a spotty quilt of crops. The city rises up on a massive retaining wall, some 30-50 feet high. Climbing narrow, funneling entry passages designed defensively to thin incoming hordes of attackers into a trickle of individuals, we rise to an artificial plateau, populated with some 50 individual circular stone domiciles.
The real beauty of Kuelap has much to do with its mingling with cloud forest plants, tall green grasses, vine-draped trees and orchids. Mossy black and grey stone rising and falling against the decaying lines of old designs, carved in careful patterns, dripping with exotic plants, smoky with mist — the crumbling walls occasionally letting spill human bones, once buried in the structures themselves… Doesn’t get more Indiana Jones than this.
The next day, a small bus took our group to a small town at the foot of Gocta Falls. Well, visibly close, though not really “at the foot”, as we would follow a guide for some 2 hours into the forest, through sugar cane, coffee, yucca and other wonderful green plants that we really haven’t seen since Colombia. We lucked out and caught sight of the celebrated “Cock-of-the-Rock”, a large and strange bird that is associated with Peruvian nationalism.
Gocta falls, of course, were gorgeous and mesmerizing. It’s split into an upper and lower falls such that viewing from the base obscures the upper reaches. One of those things that is better to appreciate from a distance, but arriving at the base was, yet, climactic and awe-inspiring. Our ever smiling and handsome old Peruvian guide made much of our visit — he was honestly touched that so many people from so many countries in the world were visiting his little piece of the earth. Gocta was, after all, only “discovered” by tourism in 2008, having finally shaken off a fear by terrified locals that the falls were presided over by mermaids. After a short stay, our guide led us back on the long tough walk to the trailhead, and we returned, exhausted, to Chachapoyas.
The final leg of our exhausting push to the Amazon takes the form of an 11 hour ride in a cramped and powerful minivan, taking hard, tire squealing turns at break neck speeds through the curling roads that descend into the Amazon basin. All I can say about it is that we survived it, supremely grateful to have survived to stretch out our legs and take in a cold beer in the sweaty port town of Yurimaguas.
To recap: From Cusco, an overnight bus to Nazca – a late bus to Paracas – 3 hour bus to Lima – overnight bus to Trujillo – cab ride to Huanchaco – bus to chiclayo – overnight bus next to bathroom to Chachapoyas – two days on buses to tour Kuelap and Gocta – 11 hour minivan ride to Yurimaguas. All in about a week’s time. Tough as it was, it has all been worth it, and it’s nice to know that (aside from some long boat rides to come) the overland travels of this trip, having finally come to a crescendo, are now behind us.