Chan Chan

 We arrived in Peru this morning. The temperature was noticeably cooler than it had been a few days earlier. I guess we are under the influence now of the Humboldt Current, the great flow of cold water from the Antarctic towards the equator, similar to the cold water from the Artic that flows along the California coast. But the coast of Peru is far more arid than anything I have ever seen in California or even in Baja. There hills are completely barren with not the slight bit of chapparal or even grass.

As the ship approached the pier, I was fascinated, as I often am, by fishing boats.

We are docking in Salavery, a town a few miles outside of Trujillo. Even from the ship, I could tell that it was not much of a settlement. Most of the homes seemed to have been built on sand dunes. They are all made of concrete or cinderblock. Most are not painted. It all looks desperately poor, even worse than the towns on the Mexican border.

Today we had one of our few tours with Norwegian.  I prefer to arrange my own excursions with a local operator, usually through Viator. They are always smaller than the cruise ship excursions, and frequently cheaper. But this time I could not find a an independent to see what I wanted to see, the ruins of the great pre-Columbian city of Chan Chan. So I had to book with Norwegian. The tour was obviously popular, and even two months before our sail date the English language tour had sold out. Spanish was still available, so I booked that. I can usually follow what people are saying in Spanish if I have some background in the material. Still, today’s excursion did remind me why I find cruise ship excursions so painful. We were stuck in the theater for forty-five minutes awaiting assignment to a tour bus. A rather sarcastic South African was in charge, and he spent most of the time telling people to just sit down and be quiet.

We finally made it to our bus. We had a long drive through outskirts of Trujillo. I read that there is a somewhat attractive colonial section of Trujillo. But this was not it. This area was poor. Trash was strewn everywhere. There seemed to be an astonishing number of tire shops. I saw a few restaurants but noticed that they seemed to have few windows. Maybe even the residents find this place depressing. But occasionally there was something interesting. I saw this at an intersection.

Apparently, this park and bus shelter is some kind of testament to Moche culture. But there are Moche around anymore. The Chimu conquered them 1500 years ago. So I am not sure how accurate any of this really is.

As the bus continued on, the guides endlessly chatted with us. Although the tour was nominally in Spanish, most of the people on the tour spoke English as a first or second language, so the guides tried mostly explaining things in less-than-fluent English. They were really sweet people, and I appreciated their efforts.

Our destination for day, as I mentioned before, was the ruins of Chan Chan. This was the capital of the Chimu empire. For nearly 800 years it was the largest settlement in the coast. The Chimu had learned to divert the water from the rivers that carry snow melt from the Andes to the Pacific through the coastal desert. By doing this, the Chimu managed to flourish in an area that often typically gets only four or five millimeters of rain a year.

But before we went to the ruins, we had to stop by the Chan Chan museum. John posed while we waited to go in.

He also posed with a dog that had picked a shady spot by the entrance for a nap.

The Chan Chan museum might have been better referred to as an interpretive center. There was a room with a large map on the wall showing the extent of the Chimu settlement. There were a few mannequins dressed as Chimu soldiers or aristocracy, though I am not sure how accurate these were. Also a few artifacts on display, though not much to identify the date of piece or its use. Most were pots but we did see this small statue.

My guess is that it was a religious object, but I could see no label of any kind.

There was room with a large model of the city.

Unfortunately, the museum was hot and crowded. It was hard to move. John started to feel dizzy, so we went outside while our guide finished talking to our group. We found a shady spot not far from the entrance.

The bus ride from the museum to the archeological site was much shorter. While the Chimu flourished on the coast here for centuries, they were conquered by the ruthless Incas. The Inca completely cut off the water supply that made it possible for Chan Chan to exist. The city was abandoned. But the Inca were not in charge for long. The Spanish conquered Peru about 50 years later. Pizzaro established Trujillo as city. The Spanish were certainly aware of Chan Chan, and looted tombs for precious metals. But they otherwise simply allowed it to be slowly covered by sand.

There was no significant archeological work at Chan Chan until the late 1960s. Since then, there has been an explosion of interest in the site, and funding for the excavation has come from many governments and the Getty Trust. Much remains to be done. Only one of the ten major palaces that were in the city has been fully excavated.

Interpreting the remains is not easy because the Chimu did not have a written language. Archeologists can only guess at the functions of buildings based on what they know from similar structures in other cultures. Chan Chan was probably mostly a royal and religious center. There are many smaller buildings, often more irregular in shape, within the area, but scholars think that these were the homes and workshops of artisans who were needed by the priests and aristocrats.

Some of the cuidadelas, the Spanish term that that archeologists use for the palaces and temples, have large central courtyards. Nobody is completely sure what the function of these was.

The entire complex is completely made of mud brick.

The most fascinating part of these structures is the decoration of the adobe walls in bas reliefs. This is not an easy technique with mud. Certain animal motifs are repeated over and over again.

The tour was interesting, but too much walking for John in the heat. We left the tour early and went back to the bus. Still, even though I did not see everything at Chan Chan, I think we had a good sense of what is here.

At Sea

We have had a few disappointments with this trip. As I think I have shared before, a couple weeks before our departure, two good ports were dropped and replaced by two less interesting one. Norwegian never gave a good explanation for this, and I was far from the only person angered by that. Yesterday we had another one canceled, this time with no replacement. But at least I understood the reason for this change. We were supposed to stop in Manta, Ecuador. But all hell just broke loose in Ecuador, and the young president of the country has essentially declared martial law as he seeks to rein in the power of the drug lords. So, it really was not altogether safe to land there. So were had another day at sea.

Some people like the sea days. I’m not one of them. I find the classic cruise activities a little boring. I am glad that many people enjoy them. But I’m not fascinated by art auctions or the games and competitions. But there was one that was so hopelessly awful that I knew I just had to take some pictures. This was the ceremony to initiate people who were crossing the equator by ship for the first time.

The awful queeny Filipino cruise director was in charge, of course.

At least he was not wearing one of his signature tight-fitting sequined tops. He announced that King Neptune was soon to arrive so that the “pollywogs” who had never crossed the equator would now become “shellbacks,” who were, apparently, better subjects to the Lord of the Ocean. All of this was recited in doggerel so bad that it would have embarrassed Ella Wilcox Wheeler.

And sure enough, Neptune arrived, though I never quite pictured this Olympian as a bespectacled twink.

He was accompanied by “Queen Dee Dee” on the right, yes, the one with a beard and plastic water balloon tits. It was never clear where they managed to find these children or what they were supposed to be doing. At least facing the pool, they did not have to look at that belly.

More bad verse followed. The pollywogs were “sentenced” to having to kiss a plastic fish

and then be “baptized.”

My attention wandered. I noticed Ben from San Diego who, inexplicably to me, had not won the “Mr. Sexy Legs” competition a couple days before.

After this, I went off to the gym and did thirty minutes on the elliptical trainer where I listened to an audiobook on the history of Assyria. Listening to the exploits of Ashurbanipal helped me forget what I had just seen.

Panama Canal

 John and I were in Panama a decade ago. We went there a few weeks after we were married, and our travel agent decided it had to be a honeymoon and arranged for flowers and champagne to be provided for us in nearly every hotel. It was slightly embarrassing. One of the things we did on that trip was to take the small passenger rail line from Panama City to Colon. It goes right by the Canal at many points, and that had given us a sense of what the Canal looked like. But I was still excited to actually go through it.

The story of the building of the Panama Canal is pretty-well known, and I do not think that I could do it justice in a few sentences. One thing that did strike me, though as I was reading up on all of this for my trip, was just how badly the French messed up the first attempt to build that canal. And that was not because they were stupid or lazy. It was just the opposite. But it was their success building the Suez Canal that did them in. That had been such a brilliant success that they were sure that the same approach could work elsewhere. It seems like many of the public policy failures of the last few decades were the sad result of previous triumphs.

The first sets of locks, coming from the Caribbean, are the Gatun Locks. These are a series of three locks that raise the ship 85 feet from sea level to the level of Gatun Lake. This is the approach to the first lock.

As the ship comes close to the lock, cables are attached to it and electric rail cars, called “mules,” pull the ships through it.

At each stage, there are two locks adjacent to each other. One is for ships headed towards the Pacific; the other is for ships headed towards the Caribbean.

As the water from one lock drains, lowering the ship, the water flows by gravity into the adjacent lock, raising that vessel. It is an ingenious system.

The lock doors are impressively huge, the size of a seven-story building. They are hollow inside, which allows them to float somewhat in the water.

None of this is fast or interesting. And for the crew of a vessel, it’s obviously pretty boring. I snapped a picture of the crew on the tanker next to us.

The old control center was located at the front entrance to the third lock.

Once we cleared the last lock, we were in Gatun Lake. This is a man-made body of water, created by damming the Chagres River. Having lived most of my life in the West, I am certainly familiar with the idea of fake lakes created for any number of reasons. But somehow Gatun Lake seemed less fake than reservoirs like Shasta or Emigrant. It was hard to get an interesting picture of a large open body of water surrounded by thick, tropical forests. So you will just have to take my word for it that it looked more natural than one might have expected.

The far end of the lake is what is called the Culebra Cut. The guide who was narrating our journey through the canal kept on talking about how it was “the continental divide.” Maybe water flowed in different directions on either side of this range of hills, but we were not talking about blasting through the Sierra Nevadas. The hills are made of very soft materials, and the real problem was endless rockslides. The solution, not a particularly elegant one, was to terrace the hillsides after a section was removed.

Yet even this is only partly effective at stopping the continuing erosion of the soft rock in the cliffs. Endless dredging is needed to keep the Canal open at this point.

The final set of locks, the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks, were less impressive to me than the ones at Gatun.

 Or maybe I was just a little bit bored with the Canal at this point and ready to be in the open water. From these locks you can see the skyline of Panama City. Compared to ugly, dirty Colon, the capital seems like the Emerald City.

And right as you come into the Pacific, you can see one of most memorable buildings in Panama City.

When John and I were here the last time, the building was not open and frankly appeared to be decaying rapidly. My recollection was that it had initially been intended to be an environmental education center and that had not quite worked out. And I think it had been an art gallery for a while, too. I have no idea what is going on there right now, but it is a fun building.

We’re now in the Pacific. It seems noticeably cooler than on the Caribbean side. We have a day at sea before we come to Ecuador.

Colon

A couple days before Christmas, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the trip, John’s Christmas present, I received an email from Norwegian Cruise Lines telling me that they had made, for reasons that were not clearly stated, changes to the itinerary. Santa Marta was dropped, and Panama City was switched with Colon. Now, John and I have spent time in Panama before and I knew that Colon is the absolute armpit of the Caribbean—a dangerous, decaying, trash-strewn piece of hell on the edge of the rain forest. I was furious, but there was nothing I could do. So I had to find some kind of excursion that would allow us to escape Colon for someplace more pleasant. And Viator had an intriguing, if somewhat more expensive option: an excursion on a catamaran to the San Blas islands. I booked it.

John and I left the ship this morning a little after eight, and with some difficulty found the cabbie that the tour company had sent to pick us up. His name was Cristian, and I gathered from our limited conversations in Spanish, that he was originally from Cuba. He drove us from Colon to Portobello, about 45 kilometers away. Today is some kind of holiday in Panama, probably related to the fact that Three Kings’ Day fell on Saturday this year. So traffic on this beach route was particularly heavy, and there were a number of police checkpoints along the way. But it was not that bad a drive, and once you are a few miles outside of the Colon city limits the rusted-out cars and piles of garbage disappear and that landscape becomes almost pretty at times.

At the Portobello marina, several people gestured for us to get on a small powerboat. I had no idea if this was the right thing to do or not, but every time I said, “¿Al catamarán?” the answer was “Sí.” Of course, in Latin America that is always the polite answer to any question. But in this case, it proved to be correct and pretty soon we were dropped off at our catamaran.

Our captain was a friendly Columbian who spoke decent English. He was assisted by a rather handsome young black man who spoke no English at all, and I only heard him say a few words in Spanish mostly to the crew on other ships. The rest of the guests had all come from Panama City and they had arrived about 40 minutes before us. There was a group of five men, mostly in their twenties, I think, from South Korea.

They basically talked to each other and ignored the rest of us. Having spent twenty years in Los Angeles living among Koreans, I did not take it personally. We did have a good time talking to Francesco and Rossella, an Italian couple who had lived for years in Germany and Scotland and were now planning to relocate to Panama.

They spoke excellent English and were delightful companions. They were both originally from Puglia and were quite pleased that John and I were familiar with that part of Italy.

John and I swam and snorkeled a bit. The coral was pretty sad, but at least it gave us something to look at. The water felt gloriously warm and was quite clear. John had not been swimming since his heart surgery, and he was pleased that he felt at home and comfortable in the water again. Back on the boat, I looked for wildlife. The San Blas Islands are a national park, and there are lots of monkey and tropical birds there. I just saw a heron.

We had lunch on the boat, and the young guy took us on a ride in the dingy through the mangroves.

Rosella snapped this picture of us on her phone and was gracious to send it to me.

Because it is a national holiday there were lots of Panamanians also enjoying this area. The kids seemed to like swimming among the mangroves.

There was a small “private island” that we skirted. It had a telephone number under the no trespassing sign, and I figured out that it was basically some kind of vacation rental.

There were three very white women sitting at the waters edge sipping wine. All were wearing floral print dresses. They looked like they were extras from some episode of Absolutely Fabulous. Sadly, I did not snap a picture in time.

Around three o’clock we were back in the marina and Cristian was there to pick us up and bring us back to ugly, dirty Colon. But I felt happy that I had manage to escape the slum for the day and find ourselves in a place that was a little closer to paradise.

Cartagena

 Our first stop on the trip was Cartagena, Columbia. I have been intrigued by Columbia for some years, though John has always been a little reluctant to come here. Maybe it was the narcotics gangs. Or maybe it was Juan Valdez. Either way, this is our first visit to this historic South American nation. 

We arrived in port just at sunrise. I had made arrangements for John and I to have a private tour of the city instead of taking the bus trip the cruise ship offered. I usually use Viator to book with some local operators, and I usually find that these are a much better deal. But one of the downsides of it is that independent operators are usually not allowed to enter the port area. We have to go outside the security perimeter to find our guide. And that was the case today. We had a fairly long walk from the ship to the meeting place with Nelson, our guide. And here, alas, was our first mishap of the day. The car was parked in a service station. And I was not looking too carefully as I was walking toward the car and stepped in a open spot in a drainage grate.

 
I immediately knew I had sprained my ankle. It hurt when I pulled it out, and the pain only grew more intense during the day. 

Our first stop was the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas. This massive fortress was built by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century to protect Cartagena from pirate attacks. The city of Cartagena was a major transport spot for gold extracted from the mines of the interior, and that made it an attractive target for pirates and privateers. It is still an impressive structure dominating a hill high above the old city. 

We were greeted as we came to the castle by a trumpeter. 

I was expecting a little more of this kind of costumed guides, but this musician was all that we saw. Accompanied by Nelson, John and I walked up almost all the way to the top. In retrospect this was a mistake. There really was not much to see other than a few cannons, and the steep ascent was not good for John’s orthostatic hypotension. Nor did the ninety degree heat help here. Still, he was a trooper and and did the best he could.

 

From this vantage point, we had both a good view of the top of the fortress, which we did not even attempt to climb

and the new city across an inlet from the old town.

Nelson led us across the street to a small restaurant on second floor of a gift shop. It served arepas, a classic Columbian street food. 

It is a deep-fried corn fritter stuff with spiced beef and egg. It was tasty enough, but I would probably not rush to order it again. 

John was really exhausted by this time, and frankly wanted to go back to the ship. But I convinced him that we could do most of the rest of the tour in the air-conditioned car and he agreed to go ahead with the tour. Like I said, he’s a real trooper. Nelson drove us around the walled city so we could see the fortifications, still largely intact. 

We then drove inside. I asked if we could see the plaza and the cathedral. The plaza was nowhere near as large as I would have expected. It was dominated by an equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar. 

 It was on a balcony just off this square that Bolivar issued his call for the people of South America to seek independence from Spain. The cathedral was closed up tight, so we never did get a chance to see it. John was feeling stronger at this point and we walked about looking at the charming colonial architecture. 

We walked over to a particularly charming square dominated by the Church of Saint Peter Claver. 

Peter Claver, a Jesuit, was a fierce opponent of the African slave trade. In Cartagena, sick blacks who had survived the passage were normally just dumped on the dock and left to die. Claver, supported by a few aristocratic female supporters, took them in, nursed many back to health, and baptized them. 

 His statue stands above the door. From this square, you can also get a glimpse of the Cathedral’s bell tower. 

From here, we drove the Getsemini, an area that the place where blacks lived after the end of slavery. It was a run-down slum for decades, and it is now the hippest neighborhood in Cartagena. We were running short of time so I did not get a chance to walk through these enchanting streets.  

I hope I have a chance to return to Cartagena some day and explore this neighborhood. 

Nelson drove us back to the port and we walked back to the ship. By this time, my foot hurt so much I could barely walk, but I did manage to get back to my room. And with that, we said our goodbye to Columbia.