As I mentioned yesterday, I’d challenged Explore Tailormade to come up with a full programme of visits on Christmas Day, despite the fact that it was a public holiday in Peru and all the main site were closed. They rose to the challenge magnificently. I was picked up at 8:30 in the morning by my driver and guide, and taken first to Pampa Grande, about an hour and a half outside the town of Chiclayo.
Mud-brick temple platform at Pampa Grande
Between about AD600-800 this was a dense urban settlement, around four square kilometers in size, and was home to tens of thousands of people. But it’s completely deserted these days, and isn’t on the regular tourist itinerary. On Christmas Day there were just three of us there – me, my guide, and my driver. My guide said that in the six years he’d been working as a guide in and around Chiclayo, he’d only ever taken four other tourists to visit the site! But as you can see from the photo above, there were some spectacular ruins of temple platforms made of millions of mud bricks. Apparently, this one would have been close on 40m high.
There was one clearly apparent reason for the lack of visitors. The road to get there was appalling – more potholes than asphalt. My driver was less than impressed, and was worried about his suspension, so didn’t want to go back into Chiclayo the way we had come. There was a good asphalt road on the other side of the river valley that led directly back to town, and he wanted to take that. First though, we had to find the river – which meant going along rutted farm tracks in between fields of sugar cane. Having followed our nose to the river, we then had to find a crossing. According to a teenage lad that the guide stopped to ask directions of, there was a bridge downstream. But we couldn’t find it – though there was a ford. As we got there, we saw a motorbike-taxi coming towards us which had clearly just forded the river, so the driver decided to go for it. Well, the rainy season had just started up in the mountains, and the river was deeper and faster-flowing than he had anticipated! The water was way up above the door sills! It would have been ironic if I’d escaped the Christmas floods in Worcestershire, only to get swept downstream in Peru…… But we made it across, and after asking another seven farmers the way to the main road, finally found it. All in all, I preferred the original route…..
A mud-brick temple in the Pomac Forest
In the afternoon we visited another pre-Inca site, a series of mud-brick temples in the middle of a national forest reserve. We had to sign in, and I could see that I was just the fourth visitor that day – the other three were from Lima, and we soon spotted them having a Christmas Day barbecue in the back of a motorbike-taxi in the middle of a dry river bed. It did seem a bit risky having a coal-fired barbecue in the middle of a tinder-dry forest of carob trees, but one doesn’t apply European standards of Elf’n’Safety in South America! You can see one of the temple platforms in the photo above. The heavy erosion of the mud-bricks is caused by the downpours which occur during the El Niño weather phenomena. My guide told me that there was a particularly bad El Niño storm on 14th February 1998, when his neighbour’s house, which was made of adobe (mud bricks) was completely washed away! So you can imagine what centuries of storms would do to a temple platform made entirely of sun-baked mud.
