Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Another day of car touring. I decided that before I tried to visit the remaining sites by minibus, I'd go past the tour agency near my hotel one more time. It had never been open before, but it was this time. They were able to arrange a car and guide for me. It's a good thing, because I never would have made it in time to all of the sites by minibuses.

I clearly confused my guide. He kept prompting me to take pictures in the museums, and couldn't understand why I took so many at the Spanish ruins at Zana (I think he didn't know how much Spanish I understand when he was discussing it with one of the other people there).

The ruins at Zana are neat to look at. The city might have been the capital of Peru if a few disasters (pirates, floods) hadn't gotten in the way. There's not much left, but you can see the structures of the domes and arches in the process of falling apart (or precariously braced). The remains of the collonade are haunting.

The museums, on the other hand, are museums. True, there are some great objects in them. I liked the ceramic duck pots and some of the golden earrings (they were for kings, who had been streching the holes in their earlobes from childhood, so they're several inches in diameter). The pots depicting the crab-man, spider-man, deer-man, and devil-fish demigods were neat too. But they're objects behind glass, and the studio photos on the postcards are pretty much always going to be better than the ones I could take. I was also much less impressed than he was by the recreations and the simple animatronics.

I've got a bus ticket to Cajamarca for 7am tomorrow.