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  • Islas Ballestas

    This morning Kerri took a boat tour to Islas Ballestas.

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    In the harbour was a concrete boat.

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    It’s not very fuel efficient, so it has been left in the harbour with the rebar slowly rusting away.

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    The islands were pretty colours and had no vegetation

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    This island was covered in hundreds of Peruvian Pelicans.

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    They seemed very crowded.

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    There is a strange symbol carved into one of the mountains. It has been there for at least 100 years. Some people think it is a pirate’s treasure map. A lot of other people have made up other ideas, most of which seem highly improbable and are based on no evidence. Kerri thinks the pirates were sandboarding.

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    There were tons of Peruvian boobies on the other islands.

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    There were also a couple of Humboldt penguins, a close relative of the galapagos penguins.

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    The sea lions are much bigger than the ones in the Galapagos.

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    The males actually kind of look like lions.

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    The females look more like the galapagos sea lions.

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    The boobies covered almost every surface.

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    I don’t know where they even nest, there didn’t seem to be any room.

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    There were also a few guanay cormorants.

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    They look a lot like the flightless cormorants until they spread their wings, and you see that they have real wings for flying.

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    There were only a couple of baby boobies, and they weren’t even that cute.

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  • Kennedy Park

    We walked through a park with a lot of sleeping cats.

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    Matt was grumpy and did not want to spend any time looking at cats.

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    The park is full of cats because people who don’t want their housecats bring them to the park and abandon them.

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    A crazy cat lady feeds the cats in the park.

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    Which is good because they are not very good hunters.

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  • Hauca Pucllana

    This site consisted of another adobe pyramid, with seven levels, in a large square. It was built by the Lima culture between 400 and 700 CE.

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    The site is located in the middle of Lima.

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    Lima is the capital city of Peru and home to over 7 million people.

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    The mud bricks were all formed by hand and dried in the sun.

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    Which means that these are the handprints of someone who lived 1500 years ago.

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    This pyramid was constructed with the bricks positioned vertically, with mortar at the top and bottom and small spaces in between the brick. This made the pyramid more earthquake resistant.

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    The walls were built in small trapezoidal sections instead of square edges to make it more stable.

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    The temple was reused by the later Wairani people to bury some important people. This is a recreation of one of their tombs in the top of the temple.

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    A large part of the pyramid still has not been excavated, and just looks like a big dirt hill in the middle of the city.

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    The transition to the excavated bricks on the other side looks funny.

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    The pyramid had a lot of bricks.

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  • Monastery of San Francisco

    The San Francisco church is very popular.

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    And not just with pigeons, although that’s what all of the black lines are.

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    They covered every available surface.

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    The church and monastery were built between 1673 and 1774. The church honours St. Jude, who is very popular, and on the 28th of each month people line up to petition him for miracles. Because we were there on the 28th the line zigzagged across the entire courtyard, so we did not go inside the church.

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    However we did go inside the monastery, which has been converted into a museum. Pictures were not allowed inside, so these are taken from random rule breakers on the internet.

    This is the last supper painting. Instead of European food it features the apostles eating guinea pig, potatoes and chilis. And in Jesus’s hand that might be an empanada.

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    In the large spot below there used to be a statue of the Virgin Mary. But somewhere along the way they decided she shouldn’t have the central spot, so they replaced the head and hands of the statue. But only the head and hands. So it now features Jesus, wearing a flowered dress.

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    We also visited the catacombs, which were used until 1943 and contain about 25,000 bodies. Many of the bones are artistically arranged.

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  • Chan Chan

    Today we visited Chan Chan, the remains of a large city of the Chimu people.

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    In the 15th century Chan Chan was a 20 square  kilometer mudbrick city. Now it looks like small bumps in the desert.

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    The archaeologists are working on excavating these piles of dirt and reconstructing one of the main palaces.

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    The palace contains many rooms. These little undecorated ones were likely used for storage.

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    The reconstruction and preservation efforts are still underway.

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    Many of the rooms were decorated with little animals. This one likely represents a sea lion.

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    This wall was covered in fish and pelicans.

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    Many walls were covered with this deep diamond pattern.

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    This was another pattern found on some walls.

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    Most of these walls are restored, and sealed on top with a hard waterproof covering as well as having tarps added overtop. It was difficult to tell which parts were original and which were recreated.

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    For the most part they probably know the basic floorplan, and a few of the symbols that make the pattern, but have filled in the gaps in the reconstruction.

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    Many of the symbols are very blocky, like a really low resolution graphic.

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    But others have smooth edges.

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    Some you can’t tell what animal they represent, if they represent an animal at all.

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    The dots on the bottom of this one seemed oddly irregular in size.

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    Most of the walls are very low because there was not much left after over 500 years of desert wind.

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    This is a reservoir they formed inside.

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    The water would not have been suitable for drinking, so they think they used it for ceremonial purposes.

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    This is the entrance to the large tomb. Most of the contents were looted by grave robbers.

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