Up the coast (Jonathan)

Hostels, Desert mountains backing up to the sea, instant coffee, double decker buses roaring up the coast, 1,000 year old Moche drawings, plazas paved with shining concrete, hairless dogs with mohawks, fruitistas. These impressions stick on visiting Trujillo, Peru.
Trujillo welcomes us like this. We get off the bus at midnight and take a taxi to our hostel where ¨there is a problem¨--no room! Taxi driver says ¨no es bueno¨. We are offered a room by the hostel owner´s sister which we take. The ¨bed¨ would be softer if made of poured cement. It would make a good bathtub too...or toilet!! Smelled like pee...

One night there and we go back to the hostel for ¨breakfast¨ included and to see about a room with a decent bed. We get room 9 and are offered a tour of the local Chimu Huacas or Holy Places of precolumbus cultures, pre-Incan even. Our guide on the first day is Michael, a brit married to the Peruano hostel owner. He is one of those tape recorder guides that have said the same thing so many tims that timing and inflections are lost. He sounds like a surgeon dictating the details of a last minute surgery before he goes on vacation. The information is, however, imaginative, insightful and fascinating.
There is a certain pride and possessiveness about the Chimu and Moche cultural sites partly because they are the local meal ticket for travellers services like guiding and also because the Incan cultures are much more well known and dominant compared to the Moche and Chimu dynasties. I am told the Incas did little that was original and were very warlike. Not the story we heard in Cuzco...

Trujillo´s food and cultures take 2 days to explore and we itch to hop on the big ¨royal class¨ bus another 8 hours north to Mancora on Peru´s NW coast. We take the midnight on August 30 so we arrive on the same day at 8am saving a nights lodging. Our last night it Trujillo is filled with angst and annoyances--beeping taxis, traffic jams, slow computers, bad pizza,no water to flush my new case of diarrhea--but we get on the bus and fall almost immediately asleep.

Since we arrived in Lima on 24 August we have been on the coast. While beautiful and inviting the central coast of Peru from Lima north is shrouded in its fog or ¨garua¨. The result is one never gets to see the horizon, or the sun for that matter, during the winter and only slightly more in the summer. In Mancora the garua is gone, the sun shines and the horizon beckons. Pacific waves pound outside our room. The sand is powder soft and lightish brown. Rocks jut out here and there sporting my beloved Ulva and crabs and millions of anemone. We sleep and eat and go to the pool and make love and sleep. We need this rest, this luxurious place.