On Day 13 we got up bright and early to go visit some Chimu ruins; the Chimus were the natives who lived around Trujillo before the Incas conquered them, one thing I've noticed is that everyone in Peru is very keen to show that there is far more to their history than Incas, who were around in the 1500s whereas the Chimu people were around over a thousand years ago.

First we went to a place called Huakas Y Lunas (temple of the moon) which was an old Chimu religious site, that's still only 10% excavated. It was in a type of desert, but there were bits of shell in the sand leftover from the Tsunami that concealed a lot of the Chimu structures. At the bottom of what appeared to be a mountain were outlines of houses for the middle class; the lower class lived by the sea and were farmers and fishermen, the middle class lived at the bottom of mountains and were doctors, teachers etc, and the upperclass were the leaders (not much has changed)

Then we went inside the mountain like Chimu structure to the Sacrifical Site, containing a huge black rock on which warriors were sacrificed to their 'god', the Moon. Different people were sacrificed depending on the situation, if there were problems with crop fertility, then a virgin (woman obvs) would be sacrificed. Into the walls were carvings of the masks that the Executioners wore; wide eyes like an owl, teeth like a puma, and waves around the outside to represent the sea. There were hundreds of different painted carvings all around the ruins; sun symbols, spider crabs, pelicans, snakes, octopus tenticles