14/07/2019 – Huaca de la luna, Trujillo, Peru

We got up slowly again today, after a very broken sleep. We had a homemade breakfast in bed and got up and left to find Pablo, the guy who was going to look at our torn 200Sol note. We found his shop and he looked at the note. Thankfully it was real, he could tell from some the watermarks, so he changed it up for us. That is a relief, but also so bizarre that the restaurant owner had ripped it. I wander if the restaurant owner really did think it was fake or if he ripped it by accident. I guess we will never know! We walked along to the restaurant as we still needed to pay our bill from yesterday, but it was locked up, it is a Sunday after all. The sun had come out and I was in far too many layers, a long sleeve thermal and long jeans. Josh was in shorts and t shirt and so offered a top swap. We swapped, I ended up strolling along in a baggy black t shirt and Josh in an age 12 thermal top, which was skintight and cropped on him. We said we looked like gay best friends, especially as our key lanyard is the gay pride flag too! We thumbed down a collectivo that took us into and through to the other side of Trujillo, where the driver thumbed another collectivo for us to head towards the huaca de la luna, or ‘the temple of the moon’.

Back seat riders in the collectivo.

More snaps along the way.

This is another adobe temple ruins. We went to the museum first where we saw ceramics and artefacts, before heading up to the temple itself.

Landscape opposite museum.

We popped into the tiny little on site cafe and had a quick packet of crisps before finding our guide, which is a requirement for these ruins. Just before our tour, we got pulled into the office and asked to help with one of the guides English homework, putting a set of sentences into a sequence, which luckily we got right! There were no other English tourists there, only a handful of Peruvians, so Josh and I were on a tour just the two of us.

Playing with the locals before the tour.

We started getting introduced to the ruins, when two other guests entered t - it was the couple from Holland (Manon and Dennis) we had gatecrashed the tour of in Sipan! It is a small world! These ruins were really spectacular as a lot of the paintwork had been preserved and restored. We saw the areas where warriors were sacrificed to the gods during El Ninos, the battle grounds and the burial grounds.

1500 year old paint work.

Inside the Temple of the Moon

Outside temple wall.

Gaurdian of the museum telling trespassers to leave.

After the tour we got the two collectivos back to Huanchaco with Manon and Dennis, and we went for pizza together. They are a nice couple and we are doing similar routes down to Patagonia so I wont be surprised if we bump into each other again. We walked back via the shop, it turns out they are staying 2 doors down in the hostel we went to for happy hour a couple of nights ago!