We Arrived in Chiclayo after a relatively short journey from Mancora and quickly settled in to our hostel. In fact our hostel was more of a hotel which is in itself a bit of an exaggeration. For the first time at a hostel I was completely unable to communicate so I had to go through a third party who was a random man on the end of a phone line. Just to explain the difficulty, I am use to paying for hotels by the room, whereas in South America they are use to charging by the person.After wrestling with the Spanish language we got ourselves a room and readied ourselves for a little bit of exploring the following day. The evening we arrived we went out to a little neon 'polloeria' which offered the standard fayre of chicken. After a disappointing dinner and with no other way of spending the evening we went to bed ready to explore an ancient civilisation site the next morning. We took a bus about an hour out of town and came across a very small village which was home to the pyramid we were hoping to see. The site we were travelling to see is a little known archaeological site called Túcume which promised vast views of crumbling walls, plazas and pyramids.Whoever wrote our guide book obviously wasn't climbing the same viewpoint as me, as whilst we could see one pyramid and we did indeed walk through some crumbling walls we were never treated to an expansive (although it was expensive) view of a former colony. It wasn't helped by our complete lack of Spanish as all the supporting material was published only in Spanish. Returning back to Chiclayo we realised we were only 45mins after check out (we got up very early to go to the site) so we decided torisk it and see if we would be allowed to check out and continue our journey to on Trujillo which promised more spectacular ruins. The hostel staff were extremely gracious and allowed us to leave early so our decision to skip quickly to Trujillo was very quickly ratified.

John