2008 Peru – Huanchaco
15th January 2008
We checked into Hotel Caballitos del Toro in Huanchaco which I can only describe as “eccentric.” Our room was in a terrible state of decoration and normally I would hate staying in such a dump but we both loved it. It was more of a suite than a room. It was on the first floor and had two large single wooden beds pushed together, each with elaborate Inca carvings on the headboard. 
Huge patio doors led onto a lovely large terrace with a sea view. There were two sun loungers, a patio table and two chairs with an umbrella in the middle. All of that for £26 a night. The only thing that separated our terrace from the terrace next door was a row of pot plants so we had to sleep with the door closed. Leaving them open would have given our neighbour full access to our room as well as made it easy for an axe murderer to climb up the drainpipe from the street and get to us.
The hotel was owned by a well-known Peruvian poet and his wife and was once one of the best hotels in Peru so it was sad to see how much it had deteriorated. The bathroom was awful and had one of those spongy bathmats which was still soggy from previous generations of guests that stepped out of the shower. The tiling in the shower was the worst I had ever seen and there was a single, rusty cold tap in the wash basin from which water gushed out like a garden hose splashing everywhere.
One day Federika found herself locked in the bathroom because the door handle wouldn’t turn. To make matters worse, a spider was threatening to devour her and she was terrified of spiders. I was on the terrace watching a video on my iPod so it was ages before I heard her muffled screams. I tried to open the door but when I turned the handle it came off in my hand. I thought I was going to have to smash the door down which was something I had wanted to do all my life but I put the handle back in the lock and managed to wiggle it around until it opened. For the rest of our stay, we made sure the bathroom door was left open.
The mattresses and pillows felt like they had been stuffed with dead dogs and the first night I kept waking up because of the smell of drains which I assumed was from the bathroom just a few feet away. The next morning when I sat on the terrace I could still smell drains and it took a while before I realised it was a weird kind of sea smell mixed with humidity. The strange thing was that as soon I knew it wasn’t the drains, it didn’t bother me anymore.
At 9 pm every night, the large wooden doors at the entrance were closed and to get in, we had to knock on a giant metal knocker which looked like something from The Munsters. A door within a door was opened and Lurch popped his head out and let us in although I had to crouch down quite a bit as the opening was so small. It was one of those places you loved and hated at the same time and reminds you that the primary purpose of that kind of holiday was adventure.
17th February 2008
We had a surprising amount of trouble finding an organised tour of the sights so we ended up booking a taxi driver for five hours for only £12 which turned out much better as it gave us more freedom.
The first site was La Huaca de la Luna (temple of the moon.) These were originally two large pyramid-shaped buildings built entirely from clay bricks around 100 AD. People mostly associate ancient Peru with Incas but there were many tribes before them. Entrance to the site included a very good tour guide. The main attraction was the wall freezes and places where human sacrifices took place. At the end of the tour we turned a corner and I was taken aback by a huge ceremonial arena where thousands of people used to gather to attend ceremonies and watch priests drink the blood of human sacrificial victims.
Our next stop was the more famous Chan Chan Huaca which was once an extraordinary city covering 26 square kilometres. Buildings were four stories high and made entirely of clay bricks making it the largest clay city in the world. Heavy rains had turned most of it into nothing more than clay hills but there was still a well-preserved area where the king and other big knobs used to live. As soon as the tour started we entered a huge auditorium with a large platform in the middle. The king would sit at one end whilst people from all over the kingdom came to offer him gifts. Nice work if you can get it. We enjoyed the tour but were happy to get back and spend the afternoon on the beach. The sea was rough and very shallow so I kept crashing into rocks that were hidden just below the surface but it was still brilliant and a welcome relief from the heat and the ancient ruins.
I loved Huanchaco which seemed to cater for everyone from the richest to the poorest. The streets were full of people trying to scratch a living, from the restaurant owner standing on the street coaxing people into his restaurant, to the old man whose wife had baked a few biscuits for him to sell for 10p to people who could ill-afford it but who wanted to support him. One man sat on a street corner with a typewriter offering a letter-writing service and another stood forlornly with a stapler in his hand offering to staple bits of paper together. One man sat on a box selling bits and pieces like chewing gum and single cigarettes. We must have passed him 20 times during our stay and every time his head was down while he slept soundly. Even if we wanted to buy something from him, we wouldn’t have had the heart to wake him up.
Surfing was a big thing in Huancao as the waves were consistent and not too big. Locals still used the original fishing boats that they had made for thousands of years by packing straw tightly together. They looked the same shape and size as a canoe except one end had been chopped off and instead of sitting in them, people kneeled and paddled. The locals made it look easy but the tourists who hired them lasted only a few seconds before falling off. The boats only lasted a month before they had to be thrown away. We saw a local fisherman returning from an expedition with a net full of fish. Lots of excited kids gathered around him to help untangle the fish from the nets and were given a few in payment which they took home to their mums. 
2008 South America
