Turning 30 South American Style With the dreaded 30th birthday looming, I ran away to South America to celebrate the landmark birthday in style.

Desperate for some rest and relaxation after a hard few weeks of doing nothing we spent a few pleasant day at the beach near Trujillo. Our hectic daily schedule involved waking up, eating, having a nap and then dozing off reading a book in the sunshine with some cheap beer. But after a day of luxurious lolling around the weather turned ugly so we set off sight seeing to look at some actually quite interesting ruins just outside Trujillo. There are two competing sets of ruins one is a huge city made entirely of mud bricks and now stuck back together by concrete. The other is a sort of inverted pyramid called the sun and moon temples with a scary head painted on all the walls in red. I reckon the later wins, largely due to tales of huge human sacrifice piles. It also helps that the Moche god's name is The Decapitator. A Hollywood ready civilization if ever I heard of one. In a fit of energy Steve donned a wet suit and had a quick surfing lessons before watching the sea go dead calm as he attempted to go it alone that afternoon. He spent about six hours bobbing up and down on his board in the most eerily calm sea ever known. I preferred to watch him from the shore but managed to stand in a pile of fish guts and lobster claws left on the beach by the reed boat fisher men after they gutted their day's catch. Not pleasant. A couple of days exhausted the pleasures of Trujillo and Huanchaco though so we boarded a bus and headed north, across the border to Ecuador.