The Cuy, The Witch and some war robes.

Trujillo, on the face of it, is a hellhole.

Dusty - in diving terms the 'vis' is not what it should be. The area seems permanently shrouded in a mixture of coastal mist and the brown dust of this desert area.
Noisy - car horns seem to be the worst offenders. I have never been to a place where people use their car horns more frequently than the clutch. Taxis constantly hoot, whether to obtain business, or a celebration that they have business, it is not abundantly clear which, and it doesn't seem to matter.
Dangerous - at least if you believe the guidebooks, robbery and assaults are commonplace here.
Inhumane - sad looking animals in cages fill the local market. We see 4 ducks in a cage that a hamster would think of as 'a bit pokey'.

So that's why we stay 5 kilometres up the road at the surfer hamlet of Huanchaco. This satellite town doesn't appear to suffer the above faults of its parent city. Despite the rather sad feel of any seaside resort out of season, it's a much more personable place for gringos to use as a base for explorations of the surrounding area. The surrounding area, you see, is absolutely choc full of amazing archaeological sites. It has numerous museums to the pre-Inca cultures who settled in the deserts and coastlines of northern Peru.

The Moche culture settled here in 400 to 1200 AD (or DC Despues Christo if you speak Spanish). In the Moches you have all the exciting ingredients you want from your ancient culture. Gladiatorial combat, human sacrifices, mummies, tombs filled with golden treasures, weird zoomorphic gods, hallucinogenic drugs, sexually explicit pottery, drinking human blood, tattooed witch doctors, inexplicable extinction... It's all here in Mochica culture.

We make a new friend in Mal and we go to visit the main Moche site south of Trujillo city. In their Huaca (Temple) of The Sun we see how they constantly added to their towns and religious areas by building stories on top of each other. When the gods became angry they would send weird weather systems to punish the humble humans. Today we would view these as the natural phenomenon called El Niño, but for the Moche this punishment would be at best the need for additional human sacrifices, or maybe also the need to regenerate the entire city by discarding the existing structure and starting structures anew on top. In the very worst case scenario, as at the end of the Moche era, the failure of the priest class to sustain food production and keep weather systems stable, resulted in civil chaos, a loss of faith in the religious leaders, and increased faith in the political classes, and later chaos.

Eventually this lead to an end of the Moche culture and this was replaced by the Chimú. These built the largest Adobe city of all, Chan Chan. According to some, the diamond/zigzag design of the walls resembles a Wall's Viennetta. Today the pan American highway slices through this ancient city, abandoned in the 1400 when the Incas rocked up.

We organise a day trip to visit the town of Chiclayo which is a three hour car ride away. Jorge is our taxi driver-cum-guide. Here we also visit a museum dedicated to the related culture of the Sican. Although similar in many of their practices to the Moche they were a distinct culture. We are unsure as to why their culture declined. Maybe they were absorbed into the Inca culture. Or maybe it was their practice of burying their kings decapitated and upside down in the foetal position, surrounded by sacrificed slaves and servants. That can't have been great for the morale of the general populace, but maybe that's my simplistic reading of it.

We also visit an impressive museum dedicated to the opulent tomb of a Moche king called The Lord of Sipan. Although an absolute treasure trove of gold artifacts and rich in cultural evidence the most memorable thing about this experience was the activity of our friend/driver/protector Jorge. Apparently he had even more strings to his bow than we first imagined and claimed to be an off duty Peruvian policeman. This, at least in his eyes, justified his need to keep a revolver hidden in his bum bag. You can't be too careful in northern Peru, I suppose.

Back in Trujillo the spirit of Indiana Jones continues to course through us. We visit several Moche temples. All have their own familiars in the ugly shape of Peruvian dogs. These things are considered good luck here. Indisputably not attractive though. Lindsay loves these dogs and the one at Huaca de Esmerelda loved her too. (Aaaah, fwwends) At least we won't be asked to eat these pets. Back in Huanchaco we try a different Peruvian classic in the shape of Cuy, aka roasted guinea pig. Surprising tasty actually, but I used to have a couple of these as pets and I try not to look this one in the eye.

There are still more sights and archaeological wonders to explore in the Trujillo area. But time has caught up with us. It's time to enter the world of another fascinating culture. We head south again, this time to Cusco - the centre of The Inca kingdom...