17/07/2019 – Kuelap, Peru

We got up early, tired but the excitement for the day ahead made up for it. We packed our bags which we left in the hostels luggage store before walking to the main square to find somewhere for breakfast. The café kindly packed up our food for us and lent us some cutlery as we were in a bit of a rush. We met at the Santa Maria Tours office at 08:30 and got taken along the street to our minibus. We set off and got introduced to our bilingual local guide for the day, Augusto. The bus was full, mainly Peruvians (apparently it is mostly Peruvians who visit) with one Australian guy (who is married to a Peruvian lady). We drove for an hour through the green mountainous landscape, the roads windy and precarious, I held my breath a few times! We stopped briefly to look up into the side of a mountain, where we could see a sarcophagus! We drove to a town called Nuevo Tingo, where the guide sorted out our tickets for the cable car, and we went into the restaurant we would be coming back to later in the afternoon, to pre order our lunch. We grabbed a quick coffee before we drove onwards to the cable car entrance. The cable car has only been in place for 2 years and has changed the tourism of the ruins a lot. They have gone from a handful of visitors a week to bus loads of visitors a day in just two years! Although apparently in comparison to Maccu Piccu, it is relatively untouched. We showed our tickets and then were shuttled by some private minibuses up to the actual gondola. We took the 20 minute gondola up to the entrance of Kuelap.

Here we had a short amount of time to see the small museum, before we started our walk into and around Kuelap. Kuelap is the ruins of a walled settlement built 900-1100AD by the Chachapoyas people. It is built on the ridge of a mountain at 3000 metres. There were some local people sat at the top of the cable car (they live a few hundred metres down the mountain from Kuelap) waiting to take tourists up to the ruins from the by horse.

There were also some small huts where they were selling some home made snacks. Josh and I tried the warm cheese empanadas, they were so good! We walked up the path and into the walled ruins. The combination of the beautiful landscape with the ruins of the circular houses and temples were absolutely breathtaking. Augusto was very good at explaining the culture and daily life of the Chachapoyas people who had lived here, before the Incas defeated them.

Kuelap ruins.

It was fascinating! After a couple of hours in the ruins we went back down and drove to Nuevo Tingo for lunch. Josh and I had chicken and rice. When we went to get back in the minibus to go home Augusto told us there had been a crash just 2 hours earlier in this town, a small truck had accidentally driven off the side of the mountain road. The driver had died, and was still on the road as we drove past. We followed an ambulance the whole way home. It was quite unnerving as we took the hour long journey back. I saw our driver symbol the cross and pray as we set off. We got dropped back into Chachapoyas, where we popped into a grocery store for a few provisions. We went back to the hostel and freshened up as the hostel host said she didn’t mind us using the bathroom. We got a taxi to the Transporte Chiclayo bus terminal. At 19:30 we boarded to start our 11 hour overnight drive to Chiclayo. We were at the back of the lower deck, in seats that recline and had footrests. We got served a rice dinner by the glamorous cabin crew (she was wearing mega high heels and red lipstick!) We watched a few episodes of Stranger Things and then tucked ourselves up to sleep at around midnight, eye masks and earplugs in.