Day 2 - Trujillo
We landed near the sea: we skimmed so low over the waves it seemed as if we would skip.
We met the driver for the tour today, Magno, and his van and brother, who loaded the van up with luggage, but due to insanity, while trying to drive out we were blocked, because the parking had a ten minute time limit, so the driver had to pay. While this negotiation was taking place, the horns of the following vehicles started to take on a rather more panicky, but annoyingly insistent tone.
The drive took use through the ruined cityscape of Chan Chan, a rolling mass of dunes, linear forms that used to be walls flanked the road, while adobe pyramids that were long ago plundered for the gold at their peaks loomed invisibly over the base remnants with the weight of gilt.
Then the city, Trujillo, sprawling, damaged or half-built, adobe probably or rammed earth, with tattered stories. Major roadworks, turn the one-way system into a maze through which lumpen vehicles filter and roil.
In an old theatre a loud voice exhorts, the crowd inside concealed by, but bulging, the curtain over the doorway. Worship, rebellion or civic order?
The hotel is built in a classical Spanish style: a small courtyard beyond reception has a Moorish fountain, white columns with golden flutes flank the passage through a clay red and white lounge with chaise longues and armchairs of rich red velvet and onward onto a courtyard housing a seahorse on a lawn of broad-leaved grass. The rooms are arrayed around the balustrades and colonnade of this courtyard.
Into the town, towards the plaza, the quality of the buildings improves. The colours are vibrant and clean, with white fittings gleaming. Windows bulge with wrought iron; ornate wooden balconies overhang the pedestrians below. The plaza itself is broad with a large neo-classical carbuncle in the middle. The surrounding buildings are authentic, the mood only marred by a neon Pepsi sign and the much more modern building in the corner in which a McDonalds roosts.
I arrive, disoriented, back at the hotel and fall immediately into bed.
We met the driver for the tour today, Magno, and his van and brother, who loaded the van up with luggage, but due to insanity, while trying to drive out we were blocked, because the parking had a ten minute time limit, so the driver had to pay. While this negotiation was taking place, the horns of the following vehicles started to take on a rather more panicky, but annoyingly insistent tone.
The drive took use through the ruined cityscape of Chan Chan, a rolling mass of dunes, linear forms that used to be walls flanked the road, while adobe pyramids that were long ago plundered for the gold at their peaks loomed invisibly over the base remnants with the weight of gilt.
Then the city, Trujillo, sprawling, damaged or half-built, adobe probably or rammed earth, with tattered stories. Major roadworks, turn the one-way system into a maze through which lumpen vehicles filter and roil.
In an old theatre a loud voice exhorts, the crowd inside concealed by, but bulging, the curtain over the doorway. Worship, rebellion or civic order?
The hotel is built in a classical Spanish style: a small courtyard beyond reception has a Moorish fountain, white columns with golden flutes flank the passage through a clay red and white lounge with chaise longues and armchairs of rich red velvet and onward onto a courtyard housing a seahorse on a lawn of broad-leaved grass. The rooms are arrayed around the balustrades and colonnade of this courtyard.
Into the town, towards the plaza, the quality of the buildings improves. The colours are vibrant and clean, with white fittings gleaming. Windows bulge with wrought iron; ornate wooden balconies overhang the pedestrians below. The plaza itself is broad with a large neo-classical carbuncle in the middle. The surrounding buildings are authentic, the mood only marred by a neon Pepsi sign and the much more modern building in the corner in which a McDonalds roosts.
I arrive, disoriented, back at the hotel and fall immediately into bed.