A man doing something to a chicken or something
kelly on the roof of a ruined church
Another ruined church, this town (Zana) used to be rich with many churches but then after some pirate raids and a slave uprising and finally a flood it gave up the ghost.

pretty ruined church in zana
same church
same church

The street about 2 days after it rained, it was worse earlier!
At some parade done by some theatre groups
Me Kelly and a Raptor!

Well we are still here in Chiclayo! We were meant to leave on Sunday, we didn't becuase I had a fever and sore throat. Yep that is two fevers in about two weeks, I feel like an invalid although given the filthy nature of our surrounding it is perhaps unsurprising. So that was why we didn't go on Sunday, the reason for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday was that the road was impassable due to heavy rain. It is the last month of rainy season atm. We keep going to the bus station and asking them and they keep saying come back tommorrow. We have decided that if it is cancelled tommorrow we are going to go somewhere else, anywhere else! The people we met in Chiclayo are lovely and we were sad about having to say goodbye, well we were on Sunday anyway, maybe Monday too, now we just wanna get out of this city! The streets here are basically at a medieval level. They are unpaved, without drainage and oft used as a rubbish dump (and to a lessor extend as a toilet). The streets in the centre and around the shiny american style malls are paved etc. but the vast majority are pitted, rutted and either throwing up clouds of dust or turning into a foul smelling marsh depending on how much it has rained. Oh and then the garbage, some streets in particular seem to be used to dump either construction or household waste. I don't know if there is some system at work there or not. We learned last week that the rubbish collection business is partially ruled by the mafia here, at least at night. During the day there is a limited official rubbish collection service but at night a certain gang/group/organisation controls the rights to route through the rubbish and take out all the valuable things (stuff that can be sold for recyling). Further more it seems that most of the rubbish is just dumped into the desert outside city limits, whenever we drive out of town we see these lumpy fields of rubbish with the sad little raggidty dwellings of the people who make their meagre living scavanging there. Well isn't that despressing! On the bright side my throat is much better today, we self diagnosed and suspected it was perhaps bacterial (I had not cough or other cold symptoms) so we went off to find some pencillin. Pharmacies here sell everything on request, so we hit up a couple and managed to get 20 penicillin tablets (for 56 cents a pill at one place and 30 cents a pill at the other - it pays to shop around) and also a syringe, a bottle of penicillin to be injected and a little vial of some cortical steroid stuff, also to be injected! We didn't actually want those but it turns out we asked for them, darned language barrier! I personally think they might very well come in useful in some remote place. All those other things only cost about 25 soles; 8 dollars or 4 pounds. So being here in a city which has medieval streets but in which there are multiscreen cinemas, american style malls, many many shops selling luxury goods, and were almost every house has TV reminded me of an observation of George Orwell. His observation of working class people in the north of England was that they would first spend any income they might have on luxury good and not on improving the quality of more basic things. At that time (early 19 hundreds I think) the primary luxury was tea and he observed that families would subsist off nothing but white bread and margarine in order to afford their tea and suger. So perhaps it is not so strange that a person here is happy to walk down the dirt street, weeving between various piles of rubbish and breathing in clouds of dust and goodness knows what when he can do so wearing some trendy quiksilver boardshorts or brilliant white new sneakers. Perhaps I am being harsh but it is my wont sometimes! So far our contemporaries we have met here have been smart, upto speed with whats happening in the world and also happy to be living in Peru, and in Chiclayo at that! I am probably missing something. On a more positive note things seem to be fairly progressive from a social standpoint, at least here on the Costa. After our first failed attempt to get the bus some of the peruvians came back to the house we are staying to chat. Somehow we got talking about India and that led on to arranged marriaged which they were shocked at. Then we told them about what we had learned from "Kabul beauty school" which we have both just read and they were just as shocked as we were when they learned about the hardships Alfgan women suffer. So that´s good here, maybe.