We arrived in Trujillo after another joyous night bus with the last 4 hours being plagued by the obligatory Latin American music played through distorted tinny speakers.

Trujillo is a main city and approximatly 15km from the coastal resort of Huanchaco where we are staying. We were told we should come here to see the ¨pre-historic surfer dudes¨. These are single man crafts made of reeds that are used to fish in the surf. The same technique has been used for thousands of years, thought to be orginally invented by the Moche civilisation that was in this area pre-Inca. They are lined up along the beach here and they´ll even take tourists for a ride. Seems it´s more profitable than fishing...

On Saturday we decided to check out some local ruins. A short bus ride away is the ruined city of Chan Chan. Build entirely of mud bricks (adobe) it was a pre-Inca city used later by the Incas then abandoned around the time of the Spanish invasion. Built around a natural spring it is a large expanse with mostly just some walls remaining but there are some really well preserved areas with carvings and tombs that have been uncovered by archeologists and are now protected. It was pretty surreal to see this place seemingly in the middle of the desert, exposed under the baking sun. We chatted to and walked around with an Aussie who happened to arrive at the same time called Robert.

After checking out the small museum the three of us caught a bus into Trujillo in the pursuit of lunch before heading to some pyramids on the other side of town. As it turned out, by the time we´d finished snacking (and Paul and Robert had finished bonding over Monty Python impressions...) it was too late so we headed back to our hostal. We met up again with Robert for an excelent vegetarian dinner later that evening, had a couple of drinks and a great chat.

Sunday morning we went back into town to organise our bus to Lima for the night making sure we would get a nice comfortable air conditioned one this time.

We then folded ourselves into a colectivo (a small minibus crammed full of people) and headed to the Huace del Sol and Huaca del Luna. These are Moche pyramids built again using adobe bricks. The largest one being the Huaca del Sol but this one is not open to the public due to funding issues. We went to the more ornately decorated Huaca del Luna and had a look around. The structure was used as a ceremonial place for human and animal sacrifices and as a general communal area for the Moche tribe in the surrounding valley.

The structure was updated every 80-100 years by building another layer on top and over the previous completely sealing the early incarnation of the building in a new thick skin of adobe bricks thus preserving all the decoration and paintings from the elements. There were five tiers to the Luna building but due the last two layers having been worn away by the relentless wind and in times of the El Niño phenomenon, rain. The archeologists on site have have managed to protect the remains and have started to uncover the brick protection from the sides of the pyramid. The decoration on the sides was amazing in detail and colour due to it having been sealed away under ground and sand for hundreds of years.

Nearly all the pictograms and carvings on the wall show some sort of sacrifice usually with the subject of the illustration holding a knife in his hand on one side and a severed human head on the other. It turns out that they found eighty or so human skeletons in a mass grave all having had their heads removed and in some cases evidence of them having been skinned as well.

We found the site very interesting and remarked on the similarities between the depictions of the carvings here and the stone idols in San Agustin Archelogical Park in Columbia.

We are now passing time awaiting our next night bus to Lima where we hope to get on another bus to go down the coast to Ica where we are going to go sandboarding. More to follow....