casma

i`ve been biking through a really intense desert lately. it's flat, which is awesome, but i've been fighting the wind a lot. sometimes it's a head wind, sometimes it's a sideways wind, but as long as it's not a tailwind, it's a challenge. the scenery is pretty awesome though. i haven't been in a desert since baja, and this one looks much different. so... i've been biking by myself since new years, and it's going pretty well. my main so sorce of conversation seems to be meal times. this is somewhere north of trujillo. i was totally starving, and i'm trying to shove down as much food as possible, and this girl, just cannot contain herself. she thinks it's the craziest thing that i am from the US. she wants to know how to say all these words in english. pretty soon she's brought over all of her friends to hear me speak english. all i want to do is cram food in my face, but it's hard to ignore 8 really cute kids. for some reason they think "television" is the funniest word in english. i don't think they got that in the US we speak english and not spanish because they kept asking me how i knew so many english words. ha ha.... this is a really nice family i had lunch with the other day. the guy on the left talked with me for a really long time about puruvian politics and history and wrote down a bunch of places i should visit when my friends come and visit. by the by alice i'm really, really excited you are coming out! only a month!
i think they had elections here sometimes in 2006, and on all the adobe walls and buildings are advertisements for political candidates. i photographed this one because it says "fujimori". each political party and candidate has a symbol, it could be a drawing of a river, or the number two, or a star. then it will say "marca así" and i guess when you go to vote, you have to mark the symbol of the person you want to vote for. crazy, huh?
this is a photo of this ruin i went to see called Sechín in the casma valley. not much to look at i guess, but it's supposedly one of the largest constructions ever built in Prehispanic America. here´s some info my dad found on the internet. "Five plazas extend 1.4 km from the central mound, three with central sunken courts, one of which is about 80 m in diameter. The main mound is 44 m high by 300 m by 250 m., making it the largest single construction in the New World during the second millennium B.C. The mound was faced with granite blocks, some weighing over 2 tons. Sechín Alto's great size may represent a 1000 year span of building." this is one of the carvings at Sechín. for some reason a lot of the carvings looked like they could be prehistoric simpson's characters. my favorite part of the trip was the museum. there was this insane looking mummy, mouth agape, feet tied together.
i couldn't understand all the spanish, but they think that this was a forced sacrifice, and that she died by asfixiation, and that she was burried alive! probably shouldn't have taken a photo, but they didn't have a no photo sign up so......
i asked at my hotel how to get to sechín and the husband and wife who lived there haggled with like three different mototaxi guys before getting me one for $0.60. it was a 20 minute taxi ride, and we were way outside of town. at the museum, i payed the guy and he left, and then i realized i had no idea how i was getting back to the city, or where in the city my hotel was, or what the name of the hotel was. this couple were the only other people at sechín and i asked them if i could get a ride back to town in their mototaxi. they were super, super nice, and we stopped at this mountain and the woman told me this story about how everyone hears singing, and sometimes sees beautiful blond children there, but that if you go after dark, you'll never return. i wish we had legends like this in palo alto. maybe i'll make one up about antonios nuthouse. anyways, they were like, "where is your hotel", and i had to be like, "well.... i'm not sure, but i know it's near this park along the panamerican highway." after checking several parks, they found my hotel. then they totally wouldn't let me pay for the mototaxi ride. people in latin america are so, so nice. ok, hope everyone is awesome! love,
-jessie