The Luxury Peru Travel Company

In the morning, we'll travel with our guide by private car or bus to Trujillo.

 

This half-day journey south down the Pan-American highway offers a shifting panorama of scenes from coastal Peru, alternating irrigated river valleys such as the Jequetepeque and Chicama, with stretches of arid dune and rocky desert.  We make a stop at an hacienda in Paiján to enjoy a delicious lunch, along with a colorful display of the skilled horsemanship of local Peruvian paso horses and their riders, who combine their art with the dance and music of the northern marinera.  This is an optional activity (cost not included), which we highly recommend.

 

Optional visit the archaeological site of El Brujo:   This site featured in National Geographic magazine after the sensational discovery here of the mummy of a tattooed priestess, buried with a variety of ceremonial and military accoutrements.   An extraordinary array of multicolored murals dating from seven or more phases of construction depicts both scenes from the daily lives of the Moche, and gory rituals of sacrifice.

 

We arrive in Trujillo in the early afternoon.  This city, founded in 1534 on the orders of Francisco Pizarro, maintains a colonial atmosphere, with its spacious main square, and marvellous colonial-period adobe buildings in the coastal colonial style, featuring huge barred windows and massive wooden doorways. We continue onwards, driving a short way from Trujillo, to visit the Huaca de la Luna, and the Huaca del Sol, two huge flat-topped pyramids built by the Moche culture between 0 and 600A.D.

 

The Huaca de la Luna is an extraordinary demonstration of what patient long-term archaeology can achieve.  Here, at a site that has been well known and frequently looted for centuries, excavations have revealed layer upon layer of ancient construction, uncovering wall after wall of colorful friezes that were intentionally buried by the Moche, and had not seen the light of day for one-and-a-half thousand years.  Bloodthirsty fanged deities and exotic gods in the form of spiders, snakes felines, octopi and other marine creatures rub shoulders with lines of dancers, warriors and naked prisoners, and scenes of ritual combat.  One wall is covered with such a multitude of mystifying symbols that it has been labeled simply "The Complicated Theme" -- until some future archaeologist can offer a plausible explanation of them.  A site museum to display material unearthed here is under construction, and when opened it will be part of this visit.

We return to Trujillo to spend the night.  Overnight at Libertador Hotel located in the Main Plaza.