Monday

Today was the long bus ride. We started the day with a 5:30 am wake up call, mandatory, breakfast at 6 and leave at 6:30. We had to go back to Barranca on the coast instead of going directly to Casma because they were working on the road from 6 am to 6 pm. There was one more "acceptable" route but it had 26 one lane tunnels. Ron wanted to take that one because we have two drivers as required by Peruvian law and the second one could help us back up when there was another car coming. But we went the long way, about 150 miles and maybe 4 to 5 hours longer than the one we originally planned to use. We only made one stop to Sechin today to see a reconstruction by archeologists of an old temple, 1600 BC, with carved rocks on the face, the first one I have seen in Peru. There were two types of people depicted, the winners and the losers. The winners generally had weapons and big hats and open eyes and the losers had just body parts and/or closed eyes. There was also many stones with depictions of body parts such as eyes, ears, intestines, arms, legs, heads and spines.

We arrived in the hotel in Trujillo just before 7 pm. Had we gotten here after 7 pm Pepe, our guide, would have bought us all a pisco sour. But the hotel gave us coupons for free pisco sours. After dinner it is time to sleep.