Moche Culture

Monday, February 27, 2012
Chiclayo, Peru
We backtracked to Loja last Friday and headed for Peru on a night bus, crossing the border at 4:00 AM before rolling into Piura in time to snack on a pastry for breakfast and catch the 3 hour bus ride to Chiclayo. As we descended into the dry and hot desert of northern Peru from the mountains, where we had spent the past 8 weeks, and finally rolled into Piura, we were struck most by the poverty and desolateness of this place. The town frankly reminded us of many a city we saw in the plains of India, relatively speaking of course, with garbage spread alongside the road and piles of sand and unfinished cement block buildings everywhere we looked. Yes, the place is a dump, a brown and dreary one, it is poor and the heat is scorching even at 8:00 AM. We anxiously boarded the bus to Chiclayo, after a one hour wait in the terminal.

Chiclayo also has more than its fair share of dreariness and heat but it makes for an interesting stop for a couple of nights on the way to southern Peru . For one, it has an amazing market, the Mercado Modelo, where even brujos (witch doctors) can be found selling all kinds of whale bones, amulets, snake skins, vials of tonics, hallucinogetic cacti and piles of aromatic herbs … everything needed for a medicine man to make a potent brew. This is also the area where a royal Moche tomb was discovered in 1987 (the Moche was a native culture that predated the Incas). The tomb was that of the Lord of Sipan and it was discovered with an extraordinarily large amount of dazzling and priceless artifacts of finely sculpted gold, silver and copper with inlaid turquoise, among others, that covered the body some 12 layers deep and that are wonderfully displayed in the Museo de Tumbas Reales at Lambayeque. This is truly one of the most impressive museums that we have ever visited anywhere in the world. The tombs of the Lord of Sipan and of the Sacerdote (the priest who ranked second in the hierarchy of Sipan) have also been exactly replicated at the museum so that one can visualize what they must have looked like 1,500 years ago. We were unfortunately not allowed to take pictures of the artifacts or of the replicated tombs at the museum, but we did get selected pictures at the actual site of Sipan.
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