DAY 2 -- LIMA TO CHICLAYO AND BEYOND

I´m sleeping soundly at the end of five hours on the short bed in the ultra-small room room at Hotel Espana when the alarm rings at 6 a.m. I have to catch an 8:50 a.m. flight and so must be outside the hotel catching a taxi by 6:30. Victor--last night´s driver--is still on the job this morning. He greets me warmly and puts me in one of the taxis queued up on the street.

There is no real problem getting a seat on LAN Peru flight 284 to Trujillo, where I arrive about an hour after departing LIM. I engage a young taxi driver, Christian, and establish a rate for the drive from the airport to the Movil Tours bus station (I need to buy a ticket to Chachapoyas) and on to the central Plaza de Armas.

Christian wastes no time convincing me that I should hire him and his taxi to show me some of his beautiful city. I agree to pay him $30 USD for what turns out to be some three hours time and travel. He´d take me to as many places as I´d pay to see, but most of my time was spent at the Moche ruins called Huacas del Sol y de la Luna (Temples of the Sun and of the Moon).

The Moche culture occupied northern coastal Peru for more than a millenium (200 BC - 850 AD), pre-dating the Incas by centuries. The Moche built the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna more than 1,500 years ago, and time has eroded their former glory. These huacas (temples) are pyramidal in shape and look like nothing more than another arid hill from a distance. Come closer, though, and you see that this ´hill´is actually constructed of adobe blocks, an estimated 140 million of them. Enter the temple and you see altars and graves and ornate friezes revealed by ongoing archeological efforts.

Visiting this site and learning a little about the Moche was completely unplanned and was simply the result of having a bit of free time between arriving in Trujillo by plane (10 a.m.) and departing by bus (4 p.m.). After visiting the site I had Christian drop me at the Plaza de Armas, Trujillo´s centro area, for the balance of my time in the city.

I managed to send a brief e-mail home advising of my well-being, purchased some more Peruvian currency (primarily to see if I had another card that would work for that purpose, and I did), and ate a solid meal of local fare (avocado salad, chicken and rice, and lemon pie). By now it is after 3 o´clock and time to get a taxi to the bus terminal for the 4 o´clock departure.

From the Plaza de Armas, Trujillo, Peru

Movil Tours is a highly regarded bus company operating widely within Peru. Mind you, there are dozens of other bus companies and several of these are also recommended in travel books and at online travel sites. Anyway, Movil operates service from Trujillo to Chachapoyas aboard rather luxurious coaches. At $20 USD it´s somewhat expensive by Peruvian standards, but that fare purchases a 13-hour overnight journey of more than 300 miles and a small snack. Moreover, I have little concern that a Movil bus will be subject to a late-night roadblock and heist.

From the Plaza de Armas, Trujillo, Peru

Northern coastal Peru is one of the most arid regions on the planet. Certain areas may go years between measurable rainfall events. Certainly the first 100 miles from Trujillo to Chiclayo traverses unremittingly sere landscape. Highway 1N runs mostly parallel to the Pacific coastline, through a number of austere small towns. Bare sand stretches into the distance, virtually unbroken by any vegetation, certainly not by any trees.

It gets dark here earlier than I expected due, I suppose, to the absence of daylight savings time, the fact that it´s late fall in the southern hemisphere, and our proximity to the Equator (Chiclayo is at approximately 7 degrees south latitude). The bus arrives in Chiclayo, about 120 miles from Trujillo, before 7 p.m. and we won´t be leaving for another hour. That leaves just enough time to find Internet service and check my mail. There I run into one of the other bus passengers whom I had said hello to, but little else, on the trip from Trujillo.

My seat assignment for the entire journey was actually adjacent to Katty, but from Trujillo I excused myself to another seat since whole rows of the bus were empty. But after the stopover in Chiclayo, we sat together and talked for the first few hours of the trip. I had only heard Katty say a few words to this point and I thought she was American, or from another English-speaking country. It turns out she is from Ulm, Germany, and nearly perfect English is just one of her languages. Katty (short for Katharina which she says is nearly unpronounceable for Spanish speakers) is young, traveling solo, and has been in South America since the first of the year.

An idiotic Adam Sandler movie plays on the bus monitors, a baby cries seemingly endlessly, and when the patron in front of me reclines his seat into my lap--nearly pinning me to my seat like an insect to a specimen board--I excuse myself and find an empty row for the remainder of the trip. A half-dose of Ambien has me sleeping soundly as the day ends somewhere east and north of Chiclayo, Peru.