Nowhere And Slow

We did not exceed anyone’s expectations on Thursday as we turned a four hour drive into an eight hour meander.

And in a first for me I found myself driving through sugar cane fields in our five ton home. That was no fun at all and a bit of a surprise to start our long day. It happened like this. 

We got up at seven and were ready to roll at eight or as soon as the gate opened at the entrance to the museum site where we spent the night in Sipan. 

Google Maps sent us to the left toward the coastal Panamerican Highway and we should have smelled a rat but we just gave it our best on the crappy dirt road. We had arrived at the museum on a decent paved road by contrast. 

And then we met a lady with a flag directing us to the left. Road works closed the already crappy road and we were on a one lane dirt lane through the sugar cane. 

The one thing in our favor is we met no oncoming traffic except for motorcycles and a couple of moto taxis but I was ready to reverse if some suicidal car driver appeared. I am not nervous about backing GANNET2 and I’ve done it often as we get stuck exploring. 

I had to walk a couple of mud holes to make sure there was enough dirt to support the van but after twenty minutes we came out into a miserably poor village and got onto the highway to the PanAmerican. 

We still haven’t got used to the trash being picked over by turkey vultures  or kids or dogs. 

The village in the middle of nowhere:

The third class highway was pretty awful and we bounced along at eight miles an hour until Layne said “Why don’t we air down?” Duh, of course we should. Airing down the tires is an off tossing technique used to increase comfort and grip as the tires get a greater area of contact with the ground. For us it was a matter of making a more comfortable drive. 

After twelve miles we saw the town and the highway in the distance so we stopped to air back up for pavement. We have a tool to sit down which allows us to let air out rapidly without losing the valve core and we have a DeWalt compressor to get us back up to pressure in about forty minutes. We don’t air down often so it’s a simple slow system that works for us. I love pavement. 

We stopped next to a field plotted for a housing development. There’s no water around here but they are trying to sell the dream (sueño) of home ownership…

Banco de La Nacion has no ATM fees in Peru but we are limited to US $100 a day each on our First State Bank of the Florida Keys debit cards when they work. Yesterday we had no luck as the bank had no ATM at all. We are decidedly distant from the 21st century here. 

Bethlehem Funeral Parlor:

We did pay a couple of tolls each around four bucks, and we were happy to as the road quality is excellent on the PanAmerican. 

And we passed another customs and agriculture checkpoint. We were ready to show our van permit and also our hard fought dog papers for Rusty. Guess what? The officials were too busy on their phones to flag us down. Typical. 

The desert looks hot but it really wasn’t as the temperature never rose above the mid 70s. We closed the windows and ran a little air conditioning more to avoid the battering of the cross wind and to reduce the noise so we could listen to an audio book. 

You aren’t surprised we followed a mobile hay stack for a while are you? Anything can happen on the road down here. 

Some of the desert scenery put me in mind of the Mojave Desert. 

Sugar cane truck: 

Apparently they grow and process rice around here. How they do that in this arid desert I have no idea. 

“Let’s protect our environment.” 

We saw three overlanding cyclists stopped by the side of the road so we stopped to see if they needed anything. They were fine but we chatted a moment with the cheerful Germans. How they cope I cannot begin to fathom. 

They seemed to be enjoying Peru more than we were. The lead rider knows the country and he said after Lima it gets better further south. 

The travel lanes came and went according to find road construction plan we were not privy to. 

Private technical college advertising. We got to the outskirts of the city of Trujillo and had arrived too late for the archeological site called Chan Chan. So we set about looking for a hostel for the night advertised on iOverlander as always. Google Maps led us down a crappy dirt road, to end that long day as it had started. 

We got lost in a middle class neighborhood and we decided we needed to turn around. I pulled forward and turned into a side  street  and as went went forward GANNET2 rose up on the drivers side, smoothly and silently and like a fairground ride I rose up into the air in my seat. Then as we rolled forward my corner of the five ton van returned gently to earth.  Just like that. Below you can see our tire track disappearing into the ditch causing the front left side to rise in the air and me with it. Totally bizarre. 

I hadn’t noticed as we sat pondering where we were that the street ahead narrowed to a bridge no wider than our Promaster van, so as I turned to the right our rear wheel cut into the ditch. We could have caused untold damage in such a banal and pointless moment. Amazing that nothing crunched. We stopped and caught our breath before we continued to search for the Hostal for the night. 

We found the big steel gates of the Hostal and I got out to ring the doorbell. A little spy hole opened and an eye appeared. “You want a room?” he asked after I said I was unarmed and would he like to open the door in the gate. He declined and peered at me one eyed, a young man of maybe 25. I peered past him and saw a short narrow drive way with a car in it. I couldn’t see spending the night there in front of their house especially with Rusty as dogs aren’t always welcome around here, even if we could fit. I waved at the peephole and got back aboard GANNET2 our home. 

We found a nearby gas station and they said we could park in the rear in dirt as soft as talcum powder. It is free and it’s surprisingly quiet in our well insulated home. 

As you can see it should have been an easy drive with a walk through a huge archeological dig. It didn’t work out that way of course. God knows what tomorrow will bring but that’s the fun of driving the PanAmerican. The trash is the irritation. 

Sipan

In case you didn’t know, the Inca Empire which stretched from southern Colombia to northern Argentina and ruled ten million people, lasted less than a century. Before them were other people they subjugated and bent to their collective will including the Moche people who lived in the Lambayeque valley of northern Peru. 

In Peru what we foreigners call Sipan is actually known as Huaca Rajada where “huaca” in modern Peru means ancient site per the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The word “rajada” supposedly refers to a split in the sacred mountain though there are other interpretations as well so the conclusion I draw is that no one really knows. But we did get there thanks to Google maps and we found the big blue sign below. 

We left our campground outside Piura around 8 in the morning and arrived at the Sipan site at 1:30 and it was a day of driving long straightaways through the desert only very occasionally glimpsing some sea water of more likely heavy cloud banks that form over the cold Pacific Ocean. It looked like this all morning as we rolled along at 50mph and not a pothole in sight:

Do you hate air pollution controls? Come to Peru and breathe all the diesel smoke you want. 

In a poor country where everyone runs on the thinnest of rubber there are tire repair shops everywhere. We got a flat fixed in Guatemala for three dollars and I did not get my hands dirty. 

Layne and I usually like to eat roadside to get a taste of how locals live but Peru is so filthy and this desert is so short of water we don’t feel like it would be good for our health. That’s how grubby this country is. 

A former toll booth no longer in operation. The couple we passed through that were collecting tolls were for northbound traffic only. We paid one toll all morning which cost four bucks and took her an age to sort out our change. Public agencies in Peru have a Soviet flavor of no customer service at all. 

We did stop to get some bread rolls and I saw this huge sign forbidding anyone from setting up a business next to the toll booth. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore now the toll booth is closed…

If you need your new water tank transported…as you do. 

I don’t want to flog a dead horse but municipal trash services are nowhere to be seen. Outside any village there is trash piled for miles. It’s disgusting.

It’s the 21st century and Peruvians are living in bamboo huts without electricity never mind internet. 

And they fly the patriotic flag like this country has done anything for them. We saw children picking through garbage alongside adults. It was utterly dispiriting. 

We creatures of privilege pressed on. 

Chiclayo is no great place, a modest always dusty provincial town but it was here we got bagged in the worst traffic jam we have seen since San Salvador in Central America. 

The streets not only had garbage everywhere, they were garbage filled with terrible potholes. It was so rough and the traffic snagged and pushed and horns sounded and motorcycles and moto taxis shoved. We’ve seen a lot but it was beyond anything we’ve seen. 

At one point Layne said she’d had enough. We talked seriously about quitting our as fast as possible and driving straight to Chile, that was our mood. We got over it later but could we have teleported ourselves back to Key West we’d have done it. 

Poverty depresses me. You can’t make the case that if these people worked harder or something like that. There is no path out of your social status, no ladder to climb, no education to teach entrepreneurship. 

Government doesn’t do a thing here. There is no water, electricity is expensive, streets are wrecked and corruption is endemic. 

We spent far too long jammed into streets filled with people anxious to get somewhere else. They’re annoying but they do this every day with no hope that things will get better. 

I couldn’t photograph the action but I took these pictures as we paused stuck in a lump. 

Evebtually we broke loose. 

Every time we see refugees we assume they are Venezuelans but we drove by with no clue who they are. 

This is the same city, Chiclayo in the nice part of town. City workers were cleaning and trimming the medians. 

We had read in the iOverlander app that you can stay in the locked parking lot overnight at the museum, so we stopped by the police department and they got our details and we were free to stay. The gates were locked around six and are opened between eight and nine in the morning. 

For two bucks each we got our museum tickets and walked on in. 

This site was uncovered by archeologists in 1987 after police discovered looters were ransacking the graves. Lots of material was lost but the discoveries here have revealed a great deal about the people who lived here two thousand years before the Incas took over in the 14th century. The Noble Warrior, 21 years old and dead: 

He might have looked like this:

He was found like this in a cane coffin. At his feet they found a pottery representation of a peanut which you can see in the photo. 

An earring they say. They must have had strong ears as it’s three inches across:

A breast plate: 

The Moche revered owls who had the job of accompanying them into the next life. Luckily for the rich the Moche believed the dead kept their status in the afterlife. Luckily for archeologists they buried them with tool to help them survive there. 

Outside the museum is a hill built up with give bricks and torn down over the centuries by heavy storms that washed away the dirt. 

Francisco Pizarro landed in Tumbes when he sailed south from Panama looking for a fortune. In 1532 he landed in Tumbes for the second time and marched inland on the Inca road to Cajamarca which ran close by this mound but they never figured it was a tomb. 

We got to wander at will and imagine what it looked like when it was opened. 

Above you see what is shown below. 

The Lord of Sipan. The big kahuna. 

And then dinner at a place that looked good and clean. 

The waiter offered us Coca Cola and I countered with a jug of Chicha which is a traditional slightly alcoholic corn drink.  Traditionally brewers chewed the big choclo corn  kernels and spat the juice into a vat. That fermented and produced the beer.  Nowadays they don’t do that (they say) but this stuff is fermented. It tastes like hard cider with a corn flavored finish and it gives a mild buzz. I liked it and so did Layne who likes cider. 

Layne got a giant plate of pork belly with lemon juice on the side…

…while I got “poor man’s steak” which comes with a fried egg. Peruvian food is actually quite good,  a welcome change from the dreary Colombian and Ecuador’s food we were used to. 

Everyone left, I fed the local dogs till they stopped eating and staggered off stuffed, set up Starlink and we retreated inside to escape the insects. 

A cool comfortable night ahead.