August 9, 2018 – August 12, 2018

We drove south along the sandy desert of the northern Peru coast.  It was desolate, dreary and depressing.  The small towns we drove through were littered with garbage, as was the countryside.  We saw people hanging their wet laundry outside of their adobe brick homes, just meters from the highway, and wondered how it could ever be clean when it was dry, because of all the dust in the air.

Here’s a bit of video of the coast from our dash cam.  No villages and the garbage is not very obvious but most of those little white bits beside the road are windblown plastic waste and that haze in the air is not pollution, it is sand.  The dunes along the way are cool I guess, but after a few hours of this we were pretty much over them.

We visited the Museo Nacional Tumbas Reales de Sipan in Lambayeque, where we were able to see amazing treasure recovered from large, nearby, pyramidal, adobe tomb complexes.  Photography was not allowed, but if you want to see some of the items we saw on display, click here.  It was one of the best museums we have visited on this trip.

In spite of the interesting history of the area, we decided we should head into the mountains, as the coast was just not doing it for us.  After a day and a half of driving, we arrived at Lago Pomacochas, a quiet and inexpensive spot to camp for the night.  We attracted quite a bit of interest from some of the locals and we chatted with them about our trip and gave tours of our little camper, and then, of course, had to pose with several of them for photos in front of our rig.

Piper taking a walk down the pier to the lake.

A local’s boat tied up among the reeds.

The next morning we paid way too much money to visit the Huembo Nature Reserve, a place set aside to protect, among other hummingbirds, the Marvellous Spatuletail Hummingbird.  We were under the impression that we would be able to do some hiking, maybe spot the Spatuletail hummingbirds, and spend a few hours there.  The trail, however, was only about 500 meters long.  We did see many hummingbirds at the feeders, but not the one the reserve is famous for.  We left, feeling a bit ripped off, but then decided that at least our dollars were being used to protect some habitat in Peru and to allow some people to live well.

Maybe if you had never seen hummingbirds before it would have been worth the steep admission price.

We first saw these flowers in Colombia. The tree they grow on can be 8 metres tall, maybe more.

We continued, arriving in the small village of Cocachimba, and set up near the trail head for the hike to Gocta Falls.  The hike in was beautiful, although crowded, and the falls were spectacular.  At 771 metres, the falls were once thought to be the third tallest in the world but are now, according to Wikipedia, the fifth tallest, or maybe the 16th….I guess measuring waterfalls is not an exact science.

A view of the two tiers that make up Gocta Falls..

Gotta Falls has only been on the tourist route for a little over 10 years.  The locals all knew of their existence, of course, but it wasn’t until after a German “discovered” the falls while hiking in the valley and then convinced the Peruvian government to measure them that the falls became a tourist attraction.

The lower half of the falls from a distance. Can you see the people at the bottom?

How about now, in a zoomed in photo taken from the same location?

Looking up the valley from the falls.

Here in another one of Derek’s great videos….he says in the video that it is Peru’s 3rd tallest waterfall, but, as mentioned above, it used to be thought of as the world’s 3rd highest.  Also, he says to let you know that the term “munched” may not yet be an official geological term, but when this video goes viral, it may become one.

Derek and Piper on the trail back to our campsite.