PERU: Some ruins and stuff

I´M AT: Casa Suiza, see below.

Two thousand years ago, in one part of the world, one man founded a religion. In another part, thousands of other men baked mud bricks and made big things out of them in the sand.

Chan Chán is a mud city built by the Chimu indians. It´s the biggest in the world - but this is a similar claim to stating you´ve got the biggest nose in the world, or the smallest cock. It´s located on the coast between Huanchaco and Trujillo.

There´s not much of it left now. One of the palaces has been restored and there you can see carved adobe fish, and diamond-shaped nets, storage huts with reed rooves, faces and shapes in the hard brown mud. I couldn´t quite feel the culture here. Same goes for the Huaca del Dragón which is located right bang in the middle of a ghetto, fumes, dogs, decaying houses and wind-flapped laundry. Dragón´s a big mud brick carved like a sinister wedding cake.

The next day, Tuesday, we got a rickety van to Huaca de la Luna, which was a pyramid built by the Moche. There are two out there in the desert, actually, the other one´s the Huaca del Sol but it´s been reduced, by the Spanish, the weather and the looters, from its palatial past to a mud lump. Anyway the visitable Luna is carved with painted shapes, men, huge crabs, serpents - they´re all faded quite badly and the place is still being restored. Our guide spoke only Spanish, so it was hard to understand the full picture. But what I certainly couldn´t work out is why they spent so long - 600 years - building a pyramid right next to what, to me, looked like a far more impressive mountain, perfectly servicable, a lot bigger, and almost pyramid-shapèd.

Anyone?