Spending the night in the castle we of course did not encounter any ghosts but did have the sound of the ocean crashing into the rocks below to help lull us to sleep. When we woke up we got cleaned up and headed over for breakfast which was at about 10 or so (maybe a bit later, I think they open at 9 or 9:30). The stay included breakfast and lunches for our time in the castle. Daniela ordered us a vegetable omelette and sausage filled scrambled eggs (well the sausages were more hot dogs but that's ok). We had coffee and papaya juice and also some bread along with it.
After lunch we walked around for a short while then one of the castle tours started. The tour of course was done in Spanish but the guide who was a young girl (seemed teenage) spoke very clearly and I understood a lot of what she said. The castle was built in 1924 where the rich owner lived until she was 93 when she died. She and her husband had 6 children but they all left Peru back to Italy where the husband was from. That meant the castle was abandoned for around 30 years and of course it was broken into and looted during that time so a lot of damage happened and a lot was stolen. A great grandchild came back to Peru to reclaim the property and was able to and then began to plan what to do with it. It appears the significant restoration happened from the end of the 1980s through the last few years. They decided to make the location into a tourist site and it appears to be moderately successful. I do believe it looked a bit more like a classical castle based on the old photographs of the site from the 1940s or even the 80s. The tourist angle did sort of change the feel along with adding the two pools below and a couple other things that are not standard.
The tour had a hall of mirrors which was cute. Also a section on the local history of Chancay the area the castle is in. The culture chose to mummify the deceased and they had discovered several mummies in the region and some of them were brought into a small museum room in the castle. There were at least 6 that I can recall. The majority of the deceased had only lived to their 20s at the oldest. The first 2 you see are a year and a half or so. The mummies range from 1200 to 1100 years old or so. Unfortunately they guide said to wait to take pictures then rushed through her story and rushed us out so I really didn't get any during this part. We asked to sneak back in but ended up couldn't at that moment. I would like to try again today.
After the mummies she showed us that there was a wreck of a Chilean ship that was sunk during one of the wars with Chile only a short distance off the coast. They had found the wreck and put a buoy marker over i. The plaza de armas of Chancay has the anchor and cannon from the ship. Then we moved on to see that they produce both wine and pisco in the castle. She explained both processes briefly. We were taken to sample some of the wine to finish out the tour. We tried a white and the red we had already tried the night before. They were good but also sweet wines.
After a short while of freshening up in the room we were told that lunch was being served and they needed the housekeeper to clean the room. So we went to lunch. I had a large plate of fried seafood which included octopus, shrimp, fish and calamari. Daniela had a large roasted slab of pork. Mine was called Jalea Mixto. The food was really good but there was a lot of it. It was accompanied by yuca, rice and onions. We also had some lemonade and a small glass of white wine was included too.
After lunch Daniela called and made an appointment to visit the Japanese consulate to get a tourist visa on Wednesday at 9:30am. Then we again visited the room quickly then headed out to walk along the beach from the port. So we took a moto taxi from the castle to the port. We walked around the port area for a few minutes and out onto one of the docks. Then we started to walk back in towards the castle. There were tons of birds around. We also had some small adventures getting around some water that had created channels on the beach but we made it back. We also had to guess that a road was a way up to the castle and fortunately it was. After we got back to the castle we immediately got on another moto taxi to the plaza de armas. There we walked around the park for a bit then bought some dessert. I had an ice cream cone with coffee and a mixed chocolate ice cream and Daniela had a flan type thing she has had before. After that we charged up her phone for more calling time then walked a bit further up to a small shop that was supposed to sell a special type of Chancay bread. Of course when we got there there was no one there at all. I rang their buzzer bell a few times but no one came out. We asked and the local said they must have all stepped out just that moment because there is always someone there. So after that failure we walked back to the castle all the way from the shop. It was a moderately long walk but easy so we really couldn't get lost. We walked to the road that paralleled the shoreline then followed that back into the castle.
When we returned to the castle we got cleaned up and then watched The Wizard of Oz which I had brought with Spanish subtitles. Daniela had never seen it and it had been many many many years since I had seen it too so I barely remembered it. From there we called it a night.
The pictures from today can be found here.
No comments:
Post a Comment