Trujillo

I love Trujillo!
The first day, I went to some nice museums, and at one of them, there was this REALLY hot tour guide. But that should come as no surprise because many of the men in Trujillo are quite attractive (well, considering). Um...I need to start blogging more because I definitely can´t remember what else I did that day. Probably ate some Chifa.... oh, and read Kafka on the Shore, which may not be an especially great piece of literature, though it makes for good travel reading.
The second day I remember pretty well, though, because I went to CHAN CHAN. Unless you are really familiar with Peruvian archaeology, I bet you´ve never heard of it. But its AWESOME. Such a huge complex, with beautiful relief of seagulls and wish, and undulating lines representing waves. There´s even a freshwater (apparently in peru they say sweetwater) lake in the middle of the complex. The guide had a strong accent, so I had a hard time following some of what she was saying, but I´m pretty sure the lake was man made by tapping into the water table..or something like that. Anyway, it´s impressive, the whole site, whether or not I´m giving it justice. And then after visiting the city of Chan Chan and the site museum, I went to the Huaca el Dragon, or the Huaca Arco Iris (maybe I like that name more), which is basically a pyramid group in the middle of what is now Trujillo´s largest ghetto, La Esperanza. I paid a cab driver to wait for me outside the ruins, because I really didn´t want to find my way out of La Esperanza on my own. Inside, though, are pyramids with even more impressive reliefs showing what looks like two dragons facing each other, dancing under a rainbow. Totally Peru´s gayest icon.
Well, Peru´s gayest pyramid and the north´s biggest ghetto had nothing on the next day´s trip to the Huaca de la Luna. I arrived again by cab, as Ms. Vanini of the hostel advised, and this time, we went through a much poorer town, well outside of Trujillo. Off the highway, the cab turned onto a dirt road, and we went through a really, really poor community. On the side of the road flowed slowly ran water like sludge though a filthy canal, and the houses, made of mud, looked much worse than in the area from the day before. I have been though some pretty rough areas, but this time, even in the cab, I was praying the whole time that the cab just didn´t get stuck on this dirt road, or break down or anything like that. At last at the Huaca, the frescoes were really beautiful, the most interesting of which depicted angry spiders. On the way out, though, I got to the exit and there were ABSOLUTELY NO CABS. Like, anywhere. So I waited...for an hour. And none came! All the cabs that were there were with tourists, who were being paid to wait, like I had the day before. After a very long wait, the man in charge of the grounds came up to me and told me I had better take the bus back to Trujillo, because he didn´t think any cabs would come that day. So after about half an hour more this broke ass blue bus came and picked me up. At that point it was empty, but after driving through the neighborhood for a while, we picked up basically an entire school of children, a couple pregnant ladies, and some farmers (I saw someone plowing a field with an ox...who left his companions and got on the bus too). Anyway, so that was a crazy bus ride back, and it took forever but eventually we got to Trujillo.
Oh, okay, so then later that night these guys tried to scam me. I was walking down the street to the grocery store to buy some kind of improvised meal for the evening, when this guy who called himself ´Fabio´and his friend started talking to me, at first about my earring, and then about Trujillo nightlife. And so I was like, okay, nortenos arent especially friendly so its nice that they´re talking to me. And then he starts telling me how hes studying English and he is supposed to ask a native English speaker some questions for his class to make a prsentation. Education, of course, being a weak spot for me, I agree to go have coffee with him and his friend to answer some questions about what I think of Peru. Once we get there, he does ask me these ´questions´ (things like...how many countries have you been in and what do you think of Peru´s contamination?). Um...anyway. Then he and his friend pull out a 100 soles billl and keep trying to get me to change it for them. And I insist that I can´t...but he keeps on going. And then suggests that we go to the ATM so I can pull out dollars to trade with him, since the next day, supposedly, he´s going to Ecuador, where they have dollars. I tell him I can´t do that, because I have no ATM card on me...which I didn´t. But anyway, we keep going this way for quite some time, even with him getting quite visibly angry, until at last he and his friend leave me with my coffee, to go ´try at the bank´, and the whole time I´m feeling silly because the whole thing had sort of felt like a set up from the beginning. But at the same time I had more or less conciously decided to go along with it, just to see what would happen, knowing that I didn´t really have anything to lose (in my wallet were no actual cards, just about US 20 bucks in cash). But once I left the cafe I thought to myself that it´s quite tricky telling good people from bad ones, and the thought left me really really sad.
Hmmmmm. I really loved Trujillo anyway. The city really has a sense of class. The beautiful wooden balconies, like those in Lima but better maintained, give the city a real sense of class. Trujillo has tree lined streets and good food. I learned on my last night that there´s not much in the way of night life...I went to one straight Pena and two gay discos and all were closed down(the gay discos because of public outrage, the taxista told me) so I ended the night by eating a hamburger at a stand in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. The next day, though, when I travelled to Chiclayo, I immediately missed Trujillo SOO much.
Trujillo´s beautiful; Chiclayo sucks; Chachapoyas tomorrow. AAAAH!!!