Right, so what have I been up to? Well I´m slowly making my way down south to Lima. I´m a bit off the beaten "Gringo" Lonely Planet trail so I have been on my own for about a week now, but it is great to see authentically Peruvian towns, markets, hotels! Inbetween towns, the bus just drives through desert, incredible, endless desert:

Then the Peruvians come along with irrigated water all the way from the Andes and turn it into green land and lots of rice. Seemingly the Incas and the Pre-Incas were using illaborate irrigation too:

The first town after Piura I visited was Chiclayo. I got a nice room with a view. In Peru, you don´t have to pay a tax on your building if it isn´t finished, but this leaves so many towns looking unsightly :

Chiclayo had a great market where you could buy anything, from monkeys to razors to wedding dresses to this strange dried fish (I think!) :

Outside of the town, there are Pre Inca ruins. These guys built huge pyrimids out of abobe bricks, i.e. mud. The whole coast of Peru is effected by the weather system called "el nino" which is caused by the warming and cooling of the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Every 2 to 7 years, it brings really heavy rains which cause flooding. Historians think it´s the el nino which caused the downfall of the Pre Incas. Unfortunitly the adobe mud bricks the Pre Incas used don´t withstand weathering very well and eroded quickly. But interesting to see all the same.

The pyrimids did hold some graves with incredible wealth of gold and pottery:

After Chiclayo, I headed to the coast and to tiny Pacasmayo. Here I felt very white and very blonde, but again after all the touristy places I´d been, I guess it was nice to experience. The town had a hill with a massive statue of Jesus (preparation for Rio!) :

The hill also gave me a great view of the desert meeting the sea:

Dispite it´s small size, the town had a strangly big sculpture park:

Pacasmayo is a fishing town and has the longest pier in Peru. It´s busy with fishermen loading and unloading their tiny boats and cleaning their catch (of octopus) :

Shark Attack??

Then I moved on to Trujillo. More tourists here but from South America and not of the European backpacker type. This ment that all tours were in Spanish and the hotels (no hostels) are a little above my usual standard:

When I was in Ecuador, I saw a dog, that I thought was in a very bad way, with an infection or skin problem. But now I realise that it was a special, very popular and prised breed of dog called a Peruvian Hairless dog. Ugly or unique, make up your own minds:

Trujillo brough me to more Pre Inca ruins, this time a whole city called "Chan Chan". This city once held 60,ooo people and covered 28kmsq. Now there isn´t much left but even so, one gets a really good feeling of the scale of the construction:

Restored courtyard:

Adobe releaf:

What´s left:

Excavation on going. The walls and large pyrimids were covered with sand up until the 60´s. You can see them shovelling it here:

After Trujillo it´s on to Huanchaco on the coast where fishermen still use the traditional reed canoes. I was only here briefly on a day trip from Trujillo but I think I´ll go back tomorrow for another wee look:

That brings me up-to-date. You´ll notice I´m sporting my Panama hat these days. No amount of suncream was protecting my Irish nose!

xxx R