Elizabeth arrived in Chiclayo the day after I did. She had had an awful time at the hostel in Mancora and left as soon as she could. I told her all about running out of gas and let her know to get fill up on gas well before she thought she needed it. Thankfully she arrived in one piece and without running out of gas.
Getting some rest in Chiclayo
In the meantime, I was busy exploring Chiclayo.
I wanted to get some web development work done, and the WiFi at my hotel was terrible. I asked the front desk where I could go for good WiFi and they told me to go to “Real Plaza.” I hailed a cab and went to Real Plaza, and my mind was summarily blown.
Real Plaza is a chain of malls in Peru. To my surprise (and delight) there were several American chains. There was a Popeye’s, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, a KFC, a Pizza Hut, and a Chili’s.
A CHILI’S!
Now, in America, I really don’t like Chili’s very much. The food is mediocre and overpriced. But what it represented to me in that moment was a taste of home.
I went from having food like this:
Pictured: Overcooked bits of chicken with various tasteless vegetables paired with gloppy, gross noodles that have been immersed in liquid for too long.
To having food like this:
Don’t even think about telling me how many calories are in this photo.
The food was amazing…so flavorful compared to most of the food available down here. It’s probably due to all the added salt and sugar, but if there’s one thing America knows it’s how to make things taste delicious.
I had a pretty great time and made a lot of progress on my project.
According to the pictures I took in Chiclayo, I was only there for a two and a half days. When I think about my time there, though, it feels like I was there for a week. It’s such an odd discrepancy. At any rate, by the time Elizabeth and I left Chiclayo I felt refreshed and ready to hit the road.
Chiclayo to Chimbote, With a Side of Chan Chan
Elizabeth was actually staying in a hostel about 45 minutes outside of Chiclayo, so we made plans to meet up on the Pan-American highway outside of town. After meeting up, we hit the road.
The scenery was stunning. Click on the pictures to embiggen.
Around noon we arrived in the city of Trujillo, where Elizabeth wanted to check out an archaelogical site called Chan Chan. I didn’t know anything about Chan Chan before we arrived, and due to our guide’s thick accent I wasn’t able to pick up much. Chan Chan is an active site; they’re still finding new things. Chan Chan was a huge city; the capital of the Pre-Colombian Chimor Empire. There was some type of priesthood there, along with a king. Once a year the people of the area would make a pilgrimage to offer sacrifices (produce and livestock, mostly, though they have found some skeletons).
Not a lot of information, I know. But look, pretty pictures! Because of how little I picked up, it’s possible that my captions are going to be really wrong.
The entrance to Chan Chan (which means Sun Sun. There’s a lot of sun there.) That’s Elizabeth and our guide walking in front of me.
This is the main plaza where huge crowds would congregate and the king would address the people. It took some of those people 3 or 4 months to travel from their home to Chan Chan.
The walls all around the city are decorated with these scenes celebrating the environment. In the top, you can see the fish swimming in the ocean. The horizontal lines are meant to represent the ocean waves. At the bottom are pelicans.
A better picture of our tour guide. The diamond shapes are supposed to represent nets, which the people of Chan Chan used to catch fish.
I don’t recall what this area was supposed to be. The support structures were built fairly recently in order to protect Chan Chan from the corrosive effect of rain.
Make sure you click on this picture so you can see the detail on the sculpture. It represents some type of bird but it’s very stylized.
There were several areas like this, each with their own style. One area in particular was decorated with square shapes. It looked like pixel art, to be honest. I thought I had gotten a picture, but apparently I did not.
Fortunately, someone else on the Internet did. Here is their picture:
Elizabeth seemed to enjoy the tour, but I was kind of bored. It was certainly an impressive place, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I was glad when it was finally time to leave.
We stopped and took a few pictures of ourselves on the way out.
Sometimes it’s too much work to take all my gear off and smile, so I just smile inside the helmet. Also, that jacket was white when the trip started.
We drove our bikes into Trujillo, looking for a place to eat lunch. Elizabeth spotted a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and said she wanted to eat there. We went in and ordered, and we both got chicken with some pasta. I took a bite of the chicken and it was lukewarm…which meant that it had been cooked some time ago and it could be in the Bacterial Danger Zone…making it a prime candidate for giving me food poisoning.
Elizabeth wasn’t as concerned as I was, so she ate her food and enjoyed it. I just paid for my meal and left. I went across the street and bought some potato chips from a convenience store.
We got back on the road and eventually arrived in the town of Chimbote. We followed the GPS directions to our hotel, but once we arrived we couldn’t help but notice there was no hotel there…just a huge empty parking lot. We drove around for a few minutes, looking for the hotel. We stopped and asked for directions a few times, and eventually someone knew where our hotel was. We weren’t too far away; the GPS was just really wrong.
After we got settled into our room for the night, I hopped online to see what kind of restaurants are nearby. I discovered that Chimbote has a MegaPlaza; a type of mall. Even better, the MegaPlaza had a Longhorn Steakhouse. After a meager lunch of potato chips, I was ready for something more substantial. We hailed a taxi and it took us to the mall. We walked around, found the food court…and didn’t see a Longhorn. We asked a staff member of the mall where the Longhorn was, and he shook his head, indicating that one wasn’t there.
I was indignant. I had seen the restaurant on the web site; it had to be there. I pulled the web site up on my phone and noticed that it had pulled up the MegaPlaza in Lima rather than the one in Chimbote. Defeated, we walked back to the food court and settled for some mediocre mall food.
After we finished eating, we stopped by a grocery store in the mall to pick up a few supplies. On the way out, I noticed a popcorn stand with an incredibly unfortunate typo.
I decided not to get any.
Chimbote to Lima
The next morning we woke up, and in the midst of packing, the zippers on my big duffel bag broke.
RIP, $30 duffel bag from Wal-Mart. You served me well.
The good news is that the zippers broke after I had closed the bag. The even better news is that I hadn’t forgotten anything, so there was no need to get back into the bag.
Elizabeth and I packed everything onto our bikes and hit the road. Lima was six hours away, and we got some pretty fantastic pictures.
Lima is an absolutely gigantic city. About an hour before we arrived at our destination, we entered Lima. At first I thought we were in a small town on the outskirts of Lima, but when I checked out the map later, it was all part of one big city.
After arrival, Elizabeth and I checked into our hostel. We were both excited about being in the city and looking forward to a break; we had been riding hard for three days straight.
The excitement was short-lived, since I wound up getting food poisoning the next day and my priorities shifted.
In my next entry, I’ll tell you all about our experiences in Lima.
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