Chavin de Huantar

Today Annie and I took a bus tour to the ruins of Chavin de Huantar. There are temples and living areas that were all built underground, with snaking tunnels and an incredible ventilation system so that there is always fresh air coming through. Some of the holes are shaped so that they are vacuums to suck fresh air into the tunnels, and some of them are shaped to push the air out. All of this was constructed with huge heavy stone slabs making the walls and ceilings very thick, and with mathematical precision--nearly everything is in a pattern of 7, even to having the main field outside 49 by 49 meters. There are intricate carvings everywhere, of the dieties which include jaguars, anacondas, bats, caimans, and also humans. In the center of the temple, far underground, is the Lazon de Chavin, a large dagger-like stone that was used for human sacrifice, and in the patterns carved on it, the blood of the sacrificed (usually women) would flow down. Pretty crazy.
The coolest thing about Chavin? It was constructed 1300-400BC, 2000 years before the Incas, and is in incredibly good shape.
It took more than 3 hours to drive there, and the drive was so beautiful. The land is cut by rivers that come down from the glaciers, and this also causes a lot of erosion, and in some places the road was all but washed out. We passed a bus that had a dozen live sheep and pigs standing on top, with a net thrown over them so that they wouldn´t fall off. We stopped at a national park along the way and had mate (tea) made from coca leaves, and saw our first llamas of Peru!!! When we were driving through one of the towns, there was a volleyball game going on in the middle of the street--they had set up the net across the road and we had to go around it.
It was really a perfect day, spent looking out of the windows at amazing scenery, and the occasional enormous Jesus statue on a smaller hill.
We haven´t been able to find any more of the lucuma helado that we had the other day, but I´m not giving up hope! It is ice cream made of this amazing fruit that is grown only in the sierras, and I can´t even descibe the taste it is so good.
Tonight we are heading to Lima. It is a good thing that we got out of Ecuador when we did, because a few days afterwards the President was overthrown and all the borders were closed, I´m glad we didn´t get caught up in any of that!!
Hasta luego, Jules