Happy Anniversary!
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been married a year now. It feels like our wedding wasn’t that long ago, but we did accomplish a lot in that year and here we are now in Peru. What a nice way to spend our anniversary. We spent the morning looking at the Sechin ruins. I tried to bargain for a taxi ride there, the lady that runs the hostal said we should pay no more than sl. 3 for a mototaxi to the ruins. Mototaxis are quite bad-ass. It’s a motorcycle that ends at the driver’s seat, then a sort of rickshaw contraption is attached to it with two wheels. The rickshaw barely fits three people and is covered in vinyl that is personalized by the driver. On the way there, they tried to charge us sl. 5 to the ruins but I insisted that we were told no more than 3. Then the taxi drivers banded together and explained it was Sunday, blah blah blah. I didn’t believe them and luckily someone came from across the street and said they’d take us for sl. 3. Ha! I worked hard to save that 60 cents 
Anyways, the ruins were really interesting. We were the first to arrive and it looked like a ghost town. I thought for sure the taxi driver was going to murder us for bargaining the price and dump us in the ruins, but luckily all went well. The ruins had a dated museum with a lot of artifacts recovered from Sechin and other sites as well. There was a mummy from the Wari tribe which freaked me out a bit. She was a sacrifice and most of her skin remained on her body—so it was strange not to see a skeleton. She had her upper lip still attached to her mouth…it was unnerving. The ruins themselves were interesting, especially since it’s still in the process of being unearthed. They ran out of funding in 1999 so it’s been abandoned until some rich old dude wants to pay for archaeologists to come back. The whole front wall and main steps were exposed. On the walls where detailed petroglyphs of warriors and lots of decapitated heads and eviscerations. There was a hiking trail that went up the mountain the ruins were on, so we could see from above. There’s supposed to be a bunch of warriors buried in the earth that haven’t been discovered yet.
That afternoon, we caught a bus to Trujillo, which is the city closest to Huanchaco. It made a lot of stops but the drive was really beautiful. It’s mostly sand dunes, dotted with shanty towns and lush agricultural fields. I don’t know where the water comes from for the farming, because the desert looks pretty dry. I saw a lot of corn fields and a few rice paddies. When we arrived in Trujillo, we bartered for a taxi straight to Huanchacho and settled into our new place. We took a walk along the beach, checked out the boardwalk and there were about 4 guys fishing off the pier (in the dark at 8pm). We found a little surf shop/restaurant called The Wave and had some yummy Mexican food. Veggie quesadillas and taquenos, which are like mini burritos that are deep fried. It tasted like mozzarella sticks if the breading was a wonton wrapper. We shared a margarita, watched the waves and was entertained by our 10 year old waiter.