Friday:
We got up, grabbed some fruit from the fruit wagon down the street, and headed to the tour agency. Then we waited. And waited. After almost half an hour, we were ready to get our money back, but that's when the van showed up.
They took us first to the Huaca del Sol y Huaca de la Luna. (Huaca means ruins, sol = sun, luna = moon) The Huaca del Sol is not open to tourists, we could only see the outside, but we visited the Huaca de la Luna. 

It is a huge adobe structure that was probably used for religious purposes, including human sacrifices, by the elite. A lot of the murals were still in tact, including the huge wall in the photo. 

Peruvian Hairless Dog hanging out outside the Moche ruins

Afterwards they took us to El Sombrero, a "tourist restaurant." I tried out the cabrito, or baby goat. They had a dance show during lunch, where they danced the Marinera, Tondero and Huayno, which are the regional dances. It was pretty fun to watch.

The next stop was the ruins of Chan Chan, built by the Chimu, who came after the Moche culture. First we went to the Huaca Arco Iris (rainbow), and next drove out of the city, where all of the palaces were located. Unfortunately, most of them have been destroyed by weather, but there's one that is still pretty well in tact that we visited. It covered a pretty large area and a lot of the carvings of fish, pelicans, fish nets, and geometric shapes were still there. I'm pretty sure the were mostly original, however, after a whole weekend of visiting ruins and museums, all the info that the tour guides told us started to blend together a little bit. 

There was also a big lake and a burial tomb that we visited on the site. And a guy and a girl dressed up like Chimu royalty that you could take your picture with for 2 soles. Which I did. 

The final stop on the tour was Huanchaco, which is a little beach town about 15-20 minutes outside of Trujillo. It was kind of cloudy and chilly, but it was a cute town. It's famous for it's caballitos de totora (which literally translates to little reed horses). They are the reed boats that have been used there for thousands of years. 

Caballitos de totora

Then the van took us back to the hotel. The rest of the girls went out for dinner, but I had had a stomach ache all day, so I stayed in and watched a program about the Stasi in East Germany, and fell asleep. 

Friday:

Friday was designated as beach day. Unfortunately it was also really shitty weather. We checked out of the hostel, left our bags with the front desk, and headed to Huanchaco in our swimsuits and shorts. Not necessary at all. We walked around some of the tourist shops, which look like every other tourist shop in Peru with the addition of mini caballitos de totora. We got bombarded by restaurants handing us flyers and trying to get us to eat lunch at their place, and then we reached the end of our walk down the beach, and decided to go eat lunch and see if the sun was out when we were done. 

We got some ceviche and chicharrones de pescado at one of the restaurants, and then walked out to still gray skies and a chilly wind. We decided to bag it, and grabbed a combi back to Trujillo. We picked up our stuff and headed to the bus station to grab a bus to Chiclayo. We had to wait about an hour but then we hopped on a bus, and 3 long hours later, were in Chiclayo. 

Maria Elena had given us the name of a hostel, so we went there and got a couple of rooms. 

We walked around the Plaza de Armas for a while, looking for somewhere to eat and have a beer. We stopped in at a pharmacy so I could get some dramamine for the bus ride home, and asked the worker which way to go to find bars. One of the ladies that was in there too said that there were a bunch on the way to her house, and she would walk us there. She was super nice and when I asked her about taking taxis to all the stuff we wanted to visit the next day, she told us we should definitely book a tour, because it would be a lot more practical than trying to do it on our own. She also told us all about Chiclayo and everything we needed to know, and dropped us off in the bar district. 

We were looking around for places to eat and by the time we got food, it was already 11ish, so we decided to just go back to the hotel and get some sleep so we could get up early the next day and book a tour.