Days 2-4

Our second day in Chavin was a well-deserved do-nothing day. At some point, the power went out, but we had no idea if it was just the hotel, or the whole town, since we didn’t even leave our room.

While we could have manually done our own laundry in the hotel’s courtyard, we chose to make our lives easier and try out laundry service in Peru. A liquor store just a few steps away on the square had a “Lavanderia” sign outside with multiple WhatsApp numbers. Rett got a response from one, we walked over with our dirty clothes, a woman weighed them on a scale, and charged S/31 (US$9), a bit more than what we might pay in the US at a self-service laundromat, though with somewhat less work on our part. They would be available in two days, because they needed to dry on a line somewhere just like all other laundry in Peru. But when we picked them up they were clean and smelling good, all with a lot less work on our part.

When collecting dirty laundry, I went to fetch my bike glove and buff out of their standard place stashed in my helmet hanging from my bike. But my helmet wasn’t on the bike. Had I brought it into the room without realizing it? It didn’t turn up in a search, so, confused, I went back to the bike, and soon found it out on the lawn 15 feet away. And my buff another ten feet beyond that. The visible tooth marks in the helmet resolved the mystery: one of the dogs (the one who isn’t sweet Leticia, presumably) had decided to attack it. Amazingly, the fragile glass mirror that I have attached to it wasn’t damaged, but the straps were chewed apart in multiple places. So I spent most of an afternoon patching it back together with needle and thread (I knew I had cut the webbing straps off our old sleeping-bag stuff-sack and carried them over mountains for some reason!!)

Unlike the dog forced to eat plastic helmets, we ate very well in this town that gets a lot of tourists, though the restaurants didn’t feel too “touristy”. The town certainly punches well above its 4-by-10-block weight. Our favorite was Tullpa Pizzería & Resto Bar, where we had two dinners and a lunch. The fully-loaded burgers (egg, sausage, bacon, etc) from our arrival night were the clear winners, and unfortunately they weren’t available at later visits. But our Peruvian-food lunch was augmented with our first Pisco Sours, Peru’s national cocktail (ordered by Rett in a pitcher), and we closed out with pizzas. They played a soundtrack of hard-rock/metal (though strange almost-perfect cover versions), and the camo-pants-wearing curly-haired server was the “coolest” person we’ve seen since Huaraz. She also spoke quite-good English (once she warmed herself up), which is extremely rare so far in Peru (when Rett complimented her hair, she showed a photo of her sister, with similar curls, but purple!)

Rumi Restobar (it seems places called “Restobar” are most our speed) was a more-upscale-feeling date-night sort of place, where Rett tried alpaca for the first time (good!), and I took the rare opportunity to go non-pizza Italian with some lasagna (though lasagna actually seems to be one of the more common non-Peruvian dishes available).

Our breakfasts were conveniently cooked up by the hotel manager and her always-cheerful assistant, with perfect fried eggs augmenting the bread, butter, jelly, and papaya juice. On one of the mornings, no one was up and about by the time we were ready to go out, so we instead walked over to Cafe Alpomayo, where Rett got “Chocolate Panqueques”, something we hadn’t seen on a menu yet. They turned out to be more crepe-like than pancake-like, but very good. And in our four days, we never even got a chance to try the vegan cafe!

Our main outing was visit the Chavin archeological site, a central ceremonial site from a 3000-year-old culture. By walking over from our hotel in the morning, we were able to beat the majority of the crowds who arrive later via bus from Huaraz and elsewhere, so we mostly were able to explore the grounds by ourselves, except for a group of European tourists (who had come to our hotel for breakfast), and two girls, who, in this UNESCO World Heritage Site, wanted photos with us (Rett heard them say something about “skin like milk!”)

When we finished at the archeological site at the south end of town, we walked all the way back to the north end to visit a spacious, modern, Japanese-funded museum. We’d been led to believe that our ticket from one site would cover our admission to the other, but the guard indicated that no, we needed to buy another ticket for the museum. But there was no one there available to buy them from. So…? Eventually he just waved us in, trusting that we’d pay when we were done. Thank you!

The day after we visited the ruins, I heard some guys with American accents talking in the hotel courtyard. I was flabbergasted I saw that one of them was wearing a Woods of Ypres hoodie, meaning that the cult Canadian metal band’s only two fans currently in Peru had found each other, in Chavin! Maybe those cactus-eaters were onto something about the cosmic significance of this place? But even more interesting than that, they were archeology students, here to work at the site (and they said they remembered seeing us there the day before). They kept referring simply to their “professor”, whose photo is one of the dozen or so on the wall in the museum, but later I found that he (also staying at the hotel, and looking suitably like John Hammond from “Jurassic Park”) was none other than John Rick, the Stanford archeologist whose name appears everywhere when information about the Chavin culture is explained! Certainly visiting a site like Chavin brings ancient history to life in a way that reading Wikipedia never could, but meeting the people who are breathing even more life into it was an unexpected bonus.