Sometimes adventure is lonely, sometimes it's not.

Sometimes exploring is about the people you meet. Today I went up the Sechin branch of the Casma River to the village of Huanchuy. I had initially planned to go to the formative site of Juerequeque and walk south, searching for late-period sites, but decided that I wanted to get to know the modern villages before exploring the archaeological sites at their boundaries.

It took a while for the colectivo to Huanchuy to fill up, and so my day started a little late. I ended up buying the two front seats in the colectivo because it's really uncomfortable cramming three people in the front seat of a small Toyota wagon. It was also because, as I joked, 'tengo un trasero hancho, pe.' I have a wide ass, man. Actually, this particularly self-deprecatory form of humor, which appeared to be much appreciated, was also a way of responding to the previous joke that 'el gringo tiene plata, se ha comprado dos pasajes.' The gringo has money, man, he bought two seats! For an extra $2, it was worth having the front seat all to myself on the bumpy ride to Huanchuy.

In Huanchuy, I immediately sat down on the Plaza de Armas and began taking a few notes about the villages we passed, the ruins I saw in the distance on the ride, and on some of what I had heard from the other passengers about local ruins. Before very long two elder men came and sat with me. They asked me who I was, where I'm from, and if I was on paseo, a little stroll. I explained I'm an archaeologist scouting sites for future research. As is often the case, one of the men, Feliciano Martinez (who gave me his permission to take and publish his picture) offered to take me through his chacras (agricultural fields) to visit a ruin that had been the site of huaqueo (looting). 

It seemed to me that I would get a personal introduction to a local archaeological site and I reasoned that - whatever the age of that site - there would likely be trails that led down the valley to other sites. So, together, we left the Plaza de Armas of Huanchuy for the east bank of the Sechin River Valley.

Plaza de Armas de Huanchuy

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Walking through the chacra Sr. Martinez explained to me the history of the area. It had been owned by hacendados named Monje and Blanco, but the land was redistributed in the 1970s during the Agrarian Reform. We walked a long time through corn fields and I noticed that the distant hills were also sown with plants. I asked if they used irrigation tubing to bring water and he explained that a combination of rain and asequia (irrigation canal) water was sufficient to sow the lower reaches of the hills; this is very uncommon in the lowest parts of the valley, where the hills are pure granitic bedrock.

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After crossing the chacras Sr. Martinez and I came upon an archaeological site that I decided to explore. In our exploration we went our own ways around the hillside settlement. Sr. Martinez went right to the top and I took my time exploring the terraces, taking photographs of the surface artifacts, of the architecture, and making notes about the site. I reached the top after Sr. Martinez had already made his way halfway down with a pile of cactus, or prickly pears that grow on wild cacti, called tuna. This kind of linguistic reversal from the apparent norm is not uncommon, and takes a little while to get used to. I surveyed the valley from the peak of our hillside archaeological site and then descended to share my lunch of avocados (locally, palta), pitless mandarin oranges (mandarinas sin pepa), and green olives with Sr. Martinez.

Sr. Martinez enjoying cactus

Sr. Martinez and me sharing lunch

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After lunch I explained to Sr. Martinez that I would follow the path south until the village of El Olivar. He confirmed that it is possible to do this, so off I went. He went back through the chacras to Huanchuy. 

My path was actually an old path that modern people thought might have been an ancient asequia. In attempting to revive the hypothetical asequia they created a very nice flat path that I followed around the contours of the quebradas (canyons), keeping an eye peeled for archaeological sites.

Path or asequia, possibly ancient, possibly modern, probably a little of both.

Before long, however, the path dissolved into the friable granite bedrock that I followed. The terrain became steep and thorny, and I was forced to descend into a very obviously modern asequia at the edge of a mango field. Before long I had to cut through the mango field and find the farm road back to El Olivar.

Following a modern asequia

Finally, I hitched a ride on a donkey cart driven by a kind man named Prospero. As we passed a small cluster of houses, all of a sudden, we heard cries of 'la carreta, la carreta, la carreta!' The cart, the cart, the cart! And so a gaggle of little children came running out of a house, ran alongside, and even jumped and hung on the back of the cart! We all laughed and eventually one of the children hollered, 'ya me bajo!' Alright, I'm getting off! And they all hopped down and scurried back to where they had come from.

B, the donkey

La carreta, la carreta, la carreta!