13) A day or two in Huanchaco

After the exceptional anticucho and intestines, we bode farewell to Oscar and Yanet and got on our bus to Trujillo. The company was Movil Tours, and although it was still cheap, it was clear we were paying a tad extra for the bus stewardesses and their impressively short skirts. Again, the quality surpassed anything you could get in the UK, providing more comfort than travelling trans atlantic.
We arrived in Trujillo at 5.30am and took a taxi to the nearby town of Huanchaco where we'd reserved a room at Hostel My Friend. It was quite dead when we got there, but a short walk from the beach so we wandered down to the sea and sat and ate peanut butter and jam sandwhiches as dawn approached. It was a really nice beach, and there were quite a few joggers about, including one old man who appeared to be sleep walking as oppose to jogging before hitting the deck and doing 30 minutes of impressive yoga and push ups before wandering into the sea. I did check and I wasn't hallucinating.

The beach front is lovely...

About 8.30 a young man and woman approached and started chatting to me in decent English, and it was too late by the time I realised... Jehovas...
I was reading Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", and when he asked why I didn't have faith in God, I explained that I read books such as this and studied science. He scoffed when I told him I believed in Evolution, but it was quite nice having a conversation with someone other than Jamie anyway so I entertained him with his persistent questions for a while.
Shortly after we went to the hostel just in time for them to start opening and clearing up after what looked to have been quite the party. The first thing the guy did was offer us a plethora of drugs, and then told us the room would not be ready for some time. We dumped our stuff, had a decent representation of an English breakfast, then headed back to the beach to bask in the sun. It was bloody hot, and at 1pm the room was ready so I took a shower before heading out again to wander around the town. The hostel offered surf lessons but I was not keen being the poorly coordinated mess that I am, instead choosing to get my bearings.
Along the beach front a local man stopped and chatted to me for a while, first about MotoGP, then about how silly I was for staying in Huanchaco when all the hot chicas were in Trujillo, and then about how I should make time to visit Colombia because the cocaine there is much cheaper than in the UK. I lied about having to meet some friends, thanked him for his advice, and made a note to take another route back to the hostel.
Huanchaco is really nice, a small fishing town which is up and coming on the tourist scene due to the decent surf, hot weather and long stretch of beach. It hugs the coast and if you go further than the 7 or so streets of it's width there is nothing but barren sand dunes and the baking sun. I got back to the hostel and headed to the terrace to find Jamie. There we met two Americans and a Canadian and introduced ourselves. The San Diegites (or whatever), Cody and Steve, were on their way to Lima, and Erik the Canadian was here to stay for a while. They were good guys and Cody told us that San Diego is the place to be for bio-tech, and we chatted for ages before heading down to the resturant for a beer before they left.

...the area around Huanchaco is pretty desolate

That night the band that had played at the hostel were playing again at a bar down the road, so later the remaining three of us found ourselves wandering the back streets of Huanchaco. A man from the deep north of England spotted us drifting aimlessly and showed us the way, speaking in tongues the whole time though apparently it was English. We got to the bar at 9 and started on Pisco sours, which contains egg whites, Pisco, and goodness knows what else. 3 hours later and the band still hadn't started, and I was not in a good way so headed back before passing out instantly on the bed.
The next day we booked a coach to Tumbes; a city on the border of Peru and Ecuador for S38 realising that this was considerably cheaper than what we'd paid to get anywhere before, and this was hammered home by the man repeating "Economico" several times as we paid.
I then took a bus to Chan Chan aka the largest temple ruins in the world, as they were only down the road. The bus dropped me off at the end of a long and winding dusty road leading off into the dunes and for a moment staring into the barren wasteland, I thought this couldn't be it... After a 30 minute stomp in the blistering heat with vultures actually circling above I actually found more people and the entrance.