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For our return trip to Peru, we decided to take a different route. It takes a few more hours, but there are only 3 buses involved and no worries about waiting for the immigration people to take their sweet old time with lunch. We headed up to Loja and spent a few hours in the city before taking a night bus to Piura, Peru. It was 8 hours for $8. The norm seems to be about a dollar per hour on bus in Ecuador and Peru. The road was smooth and we slept for most of the night. At 4am we had to get out of the bus to get our exit and entry stamps. People randomly got on the bus during the ride and at one point there was a woman and 3 children sleeping in the aisle against my leg.

In Piura, we spent a few hours in the town, walking around visiting the trash and medical waste-strewn river and having terrible service (they were out of almost everything we wanted and they didn’t care. no suggestions, just, we’re out! and she’d walk away…so we just left hungry and got some candy bars to tide us over.) We took the 3 hour bus to Chiclayo, where we spent the night and saw 3 movies and got frustrated again with the food. (A few weeks in a gringo town changed our expectations of service and food options…It will take a few days to adjust again to the lifestyle here).

In Chiclayo we walked around, found a vegetarian restaurant (yay! Govinda, the 900 block of Diego de la Vega. sl. 4 menus) and wandered through the big market, where they sell anything you can imagine. I felt like I was in Chinatown in NYC except it was all run by Peruvians. It was all the same stuff: clothes, toys, junk. Matt was almost pickpocketed in the market, luckily his pockets are deep and the guy went for the wrong pocket. That was our first experience with a pickpocketer and it’s been 3.5 months. Matt and I yelled at him as he walked away and some old ladies gathered, obviously worried about us. We’ve met plenty of nice people who seem to routinely apologize for the schmucks that are around…but they’re in every country and I’m glad we’ve found plenty of caring, nice people to make up for the crap. My intention in the market was to find the mercado de brujos, where the witch doctors hang out and sell cures and potions and stuff…or so I thought according to the guidebook. They were normal people and each stall was selling the EXACT stuff as the next stall…and everything looked like a rouse. They were boxed remedies for anything from fungus to love potion but the packaging made me think of junk I’ve seen in Chinatown from the 80′s. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chinatown just shipped all the crap that didn’t sell to Peru and now it’s marketed for tourists…I expected old men with lots of herbs and roots and prescribing herbal concoctions and remedies, not any “guaranteed to do this or that” in packaging with photos of white people with a soft focus that is SO late 70′s…and every vendor we walked by let us know they had San Pedro Cactus and Hiawaska for sale (hallucinogenic cacti from the mountains and a hallucinogenic vine from the jungle that shamans use in their ceremonies). Regardless to say, I bought nothing at the market except sunglasses (I lost my REI pair somewhere near Celendin) for $2…hmm that’s what I pay for sunglasses in NYC.
We took a local bus for sl.1 to Lambayeque to see the Museum of Señor de Sipan. The Huaca Rayada (temple from the Moche period) was discovered in 1987 after an archaeologist saw booty being sold on the black market and eventually found the ransacked tomb. Lucky for him they didn’t ransack the amazing tombs filled with jewelry, weapons, sea shells bodies and more. The museum houses most of the stuff and it’s the best musuem I’ve been to so far in South America. The musuem takes you through the excavation process from the beginning of meticulously detailing the digging to the Señor de Sipan himself, obviously a king who was buried with his wife, a few other women, a solder, a guardian with his feet cut off, a dog a snake and 2 llamas. The king was buried with many layers of jewelry and armor, down to his golden sandals and crown. The museum is well done and detailed and a bit overwhelming by the end, since they detail not only his tomb layer by layer ending at his skeleton, but it details an older king found in another tomb as well as a a handful of other tombs of important people. At the end of the museum they have some life-life people dressed in the garb that was found and recreated to look like they did when they were alive, like the king’s royal court. A door shuts, music plays and some of them are anamatronic, playing pan pipes, the drum, and more. It’s interesting, a bit creepy and overall amazing that so much has been learned about the Moche. They had advanced mettalurgy, pottery that details many aspects of their life (one pot has a detailed scene of a woman in labor, crowning, with a midwife assisting). We didn’t make it to the actual temple site, as we spent more time in the museum than we thought. We got some snacks and headed back to Chiclayo to wait out our next overnight bus ride.

We rode from Chiclayo direct to Chachapoyas on the Movil bus for sl.45 each. It was $5 more than the normal bus, but the seats reclined and it’s a smooth ride, not to mention that Matt and I got the seats at the front of the bus, above the driver. So we had a full view of the whole journey as if we were driving. I slept through most of the ride, but Matt got some photos of the partial cave we went through. The bus drivers here drive really fast around the corners; I’m still not used to it and expect the bus to flip over every time. Luckily this journey back to the cloud forest was much smoother and overall took less time since our layovers weren’t very long…although we did get stuck in Chachapoyas yet again. I knew we shouldn’t have visited the well in the town last time we were there. The folklore is if you go to the well you are destined to come to Chachapoyas again..but they don’t signify for how long this boring town will suck you in for. We arrived around 6am and the next/first bus to Leymebamba was at noon…once again we tried to waste time and spent hours in the internet cafe. But we made it to Leymebamba to begin our next project!