Chavin, Huaraz, and darling Gilda Moreno

I never intended to spend much time in Huaraz. I´m still glad that that was the plan, but I ended up having an awesome time while I was there!
I got in really early in the morning and then quickly found a bus headed to Chavin de Huantar. On the bus ride, I met a lady from Lima named Netti who really, really loved to talk. Behind us sat this lady from Montreal and this girl named Sarah from the US. At our lunch stop, the four of us sat together and the Lima lady recommended that I order something called Pachamanca, which is a really cool dish, mostly because they prepare it in such a bizarre way. To make Pachamanca, you dig a whole underground and lay coals, creating a sort of subterranean oven, and then you stick three different kinds of meats, a tamale, a humita (another kind of tamale) and some potatoes and avas in there, and let it cook for like ten hours. What comes out is heavenly! Although I really only ate the tamales and chicken.
Chavin is such an amazing site! It´s now easily one of my favorites, partly because its really fun to visit. Chavin is...i don´t know... interactive, I guess, because it has all of these tunnels that they dramatically call ¨labyrinths¨ to wander around in, and because the whole experience of approaching the Lanzon, a giant sculpture at the heart of these socalled labyrinths, is so otherworldly. As if that weren´t surreal enough, on the wall at the beautiful new site museum (funded by the Japanese embassy) was a picture and biography of Professor Burger, who is listed as a Chavin Expert! Also, it was really neat to see the beautifully sculpted tenoned heads in person.
Chavin really put me in the mood to see some more ruins, so that American girl and I decided to take a day hike the next day for some Wari ruins about 10 Km outside of Huaraz. Wilkawain is probably the most throroughly reconstructed of any site that Ive encountered in Peru, as it looks completely intact. On the downside, they added some stairs for visitor access that can be really confusing, since they tried to make it look as if these were part of the original construction, but again, it was fun to just sort of climb into the ruins and feel our way around in the dark rooms.
After visiting this site, there was still one more about 1 km up the hill, so we headed there. On the way over, though, we heard live music and found that quite odd, since we were more or less in the middle of nowhere. As we approached the site, the music got louder and louder, until we realized that there was a little blonde lady in traditional dress dancing while her band played their instruments in the background. Intrigued, we stood at a good distance watching and snapping photos, and I soon realized that there was a lady holding a bounce card to give the singer good light and a guy with a camera... they were making a music video! And not long after we hid ourselves (we thought we had done it well) to watch, little Gilda Moreno called out to us to come over and dance with her in her music video! hahaha so we left our bags on this rock and went over to stand by her, and she just told us to follow her rhythm and look at her now and then when it matched the lyrics (kind of hard to anticipate actually) but we did our best and it was the craziest experience. Afterwards, she talked to us for a while, and she was so nice and insisted that we stick around for the rest of the shoot, so we went with the crew as they changed locations and this time posed as angered lovers behind her while she pretended to intrude in our otherwise peaceful relationship. Then the cameraman did closeups of our faces to get our eyes, and this little lady, Gilda, was just such a sweetheart with all her crazy costumes and dramatic flair...I dunnno, it was one of the best things that has happened on the whole trip!
So after our brush with celebrity, we finally visited the other ruins, and then headed back down the mountain to Huaraz. On the way, we got sic ed by dogs for trying to take pictures of sheep, saw a typical Andean woman doing her laundry naked in her back yard, and then got chased by dogs again, but it was great scenery and a nice walk. I only have twenty something seconds left...so I guess thats it for now!