Mud

The wall!
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A shitty night bus got me into Chachapoyas at 6am on Saturday - what a great way to spend a Friday night!

Spent the day wandering around the metropolis that is Chachapoyas.  Quiet and pleasant is the way a guide book would probably describe it.  Hardly any gringos is another.  Met a guy from Manchester and we signed up for a few tours to nearby ruins.  I had planned to try and make my own way around to the ruins but after the 1st tour and a look at the state of the roads and the lack of public transport, it's a whole lot easier to take a tour.

More wall.
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First up, Kuelap (there's an accent in there somewhere but I'm not sure where it can be found on the keyboard).  Basically, the site is on the top of a mountain and consists of a ridiculously, stupidly big wall that took something like 100 years to build and was made of rock from hundreds of kilometres away.  They really went to a lot of trouble to build this city.  They also decided to bury people in the walls so you can see a lot of skeletons in the holes in the wall.

Part of a round house.
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We spent the next day being driven between ruins in a mostly sideways, crab like fashion along really muddy mountain roads.  We had a few encounters with hedgerows (allegedly we were hunting for hethereto undiscovered ruins), but we did get back OK.  We visited the Pueblo de los Muertos (Town of the dead), which is possible the most ridiculous location of any town in the world.  It's about 50 metres up on the side of a cliff and you walk around the town on platforms 2 feet wide right on the edge of the cliff.  The civilisation probably died out due to sleep walking related deaths.