Trujillo

Another couple weeks have passed and I cant believe I'm half way through my summer here. We were lucky to be given some time off to travel and see Machu Picchu. Im going to split this into 3 different posts. One for Trujillo, one for Lima, and one for Cusco!

First off, blogspot is going crazy on me and the photos are going where I want them to, so this post may not look very pretty, but it has all the right information on it. So our journey started with a 6 hour bus ride from Piura to Trujillo. We left around midnight so we would get there in the morning! At 6am, nothing is open obviously so we went straight to our hotel/hostel and fell asleep for a couple more hours. We were all really paranoid about bed bugs because someone in our group had gotten them from a different hostel a couple weeks ago and she said it was the most miserable experience for her. I ended up sleeping in my jeans because I didn't want to risk it. We met up with a girl that Kanani knew and she took us to her favorite breakfast place. We ended up eating chicken sandwiches for breakfast, which is interesting, but it was one of the BEST sandwiches I have ever had. After breakfast we went to a ruin called Chan-Chan. We took a bus as close as we could, which was about a 30 minute walk away. We met some tour guides there on the street. It was a little weird because this place felt like it was in the middle of nowhere and we just had to trust that these guys on the side of the road were tour guides and not something else. Everything turned out fine though. Chan-Chan is the largest adobe city in the world and was built by the Inca Empire.  The photo below is right in the center of the city where the reservoir was. There are more photos at the bottom with more details.

I couldn't believe how big the place was. We actually had to have a guy drive us to the different major locations in order to see it all. Some places had more detail that others but the photo above was the largest location. We spent the majority of the Later that day we went to dinner at Los Sombreros and I had probably the best Lomo Saltado yet. Lomo Saltado is one of Peru's most popular dishes. That and Ceviche (raw fish...not very good). It was a beach front restaurant and definitely would have costed a lot more if it was in the US. I probably spent $8 on that meal. We ate, then walked around the beach for a while, just in time to see the beautiful sunset ( photo at the bottom ). The photo below is of me, Schyler, and Hannah. I love these girls so much. They make me laugh every day and we have become really good friends. The nice thing is that all of the people Im living with right now live within an hour of me in Utah so I know that I will still see them back home. 

The next day we slept in a little bit knowing that we were going to go hit up some more ruins (exhausting). We went to the Temple of the Sun where we walked around and listened to the tour guide. I loved this ruin so much more than Chan Chan! It has been preserved really well and you can see a lot of detail in the temple. While taking the tour, I was trying to imagine what live would have been like. Trust me, thats not an easy thing to do. Putting myself in their shoes while being there was the best part about it for me. It definitely made things more real. Below is a photo of me in front of it as well as on the top looking over at the Temple of the Moon.

Our last partial day in Trujillo we went to church where we met some other guys from Utah. There were here with a medical program up at the University of Utah. We spent some time with them that afternoon and went to the botanical gardens there. That evening we took a 10 hour bus ride from Trujillo to Lima! It was nice to take our bus rides through the night because we could just sleep and didn't have to pay for a hotel or a hostel. Ill pick up on Lima in the next post but here are some more photos from Trujillo!

Artsy Chan-Chan

The pier of Huanchaco beach.

The ladies.

The Peruvian hairless dog.

Huanchaco at sunset.