Four stops before the checkout

Trujillo, Peru

Stop one

Chan Chan

Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set: Come here, sweetheart, out of that sun. Chan Chan, just west of Trujillo, was the capital of the Chimú kingdom and the largest adobe city in the Americas, some twenty square kilometres, with a monumental core of nine or ten walled citadels, each apparently built for a successive ruler and then sealed as his tomb. Building your own house knowing it will be your resting place — my cousin's husband was much the same about his shed. Perhaps thirty thousand people lived here at its height in the fifteenth century, before the Inca conquered the Chimú around 1470. Friezes of fish, pelicans and nets in the mud. El Niño rain threatens all of it, and UNESCO listed it as in danger in 1986.

Stop two

Huaca de la Luna

Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set: Eat something first, it is a walk. This is a Moche temple complex, built in successive layers between roughly 100 and 800 AD, facing the larger Huaca del Sol across the plain that held the Moche capital, and excavation since 1991 has shown that each rebuilding sealed the previous structure intact — which is why the polychrome murals survive: the fanged deity known as Ai Apaec, processions of warriors and prisoners, spiders, combat scenes. Human remains found in a plaza indicate the sacrifice of captives, corresponding to scenes on Moche pottery. The Moche made the finest ceramics of ancient Peru, portrait vessels with real faces. The site museum holds the finds.

cardio tennis for mood boost — Plaza de Armas de Trujillo in Trujillo, A wide colonial square with a tall white marble monument of allegorical figures at its centre, surrounded by mansions painted in strong yellow, blue and turquoise with white window grilles of wrought iron

Stop three

Huaca Arco Iris

Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set: Now this one I love, and I will tell you why. It is a Chimú ceremonial platform on the northern edge of Trujillo, built around the twelfth or thirteenth century, and its walls carry moulded friezes of an arching motif with serpent or dragon heads at either end, read as a rainbow and associated with rain and fertility, in a desert where water was everything. A ramp leads up to an upper platform with storage chambers. Sand buried the whole thing for centuries, which is exactly what preserved the reliefs, and excavation began in 1963, so you can see modern reconstruction against the original work. Sand, doing the preserving. Like a good lid, sweetheart.

cardio tennis for mood boost — Huaca del Dragón (Arco Iris) in Trujillo, A compact adobe pyramid with a walled forecourt, its enclosing walls covered in repeated relief friezes of a two-headed serpent arching like a rainbow above small human figures, cut into pale mud plaster

Stop four

Trujillo Cathedral

Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set: Sit with me on the square a minute. The cathedral was built between 1647 and 1666, after earthquakes destroyed the earlier church, and it has been damaged and repaired repeatedly ever since, the way everything that lasts is. It stands on the Plaza de Armas of a city founded in 1534 by Diego de Almagro and named for Francisco Pizarro's birthplace in Extremadura, and the square is ringed with colonial and republican mansions in strong yellows, blues and reds, with those elaborate wrought-iron window grilles that are Trujillo's signature. The city declared independence from Spain in December 1820, the first in Peru. There is a museum of colonial religious art inside.

The Trujillo, Peru track

Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set

Written for this world alone.

Seventeen thousand seats used to be my definition of a good afternoon. Then I saw what the desert here has kept, and I have revised the figure upwards. Anyway — Head Lynx Touch 16g: a co-polyester monofilament at 1.30 mm, the durable gauge, tuned in the Touch character for a softer and more comfortable feel than standard Lynx. One 12-metre set, one racquet.

Thick enough to last a serious week, gentle enough that your elbow does not file a complaint.

Trujillo, then. We begin outside the city at Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimú kingdom and the largest adobe city in the Americas: tan walls standing in bare desert, carved in repeating friezes of fish, seabirds and geometric net patterns, enclosing empty plazas, corridors and a stepped reservoir.

It is built as a series of walled compounds, each apparently raised for a ruler and sealed as his burial complex when he died, with storerooms, wells and audience courts inside and the craftsmen's neighbourhoods around them. The Chimú were conquered by the Inca shortly before the Spanish arrived, and Chan Chan is listed by UNESCO as in danger from erosion.

At the foot of Cerro Blanco, the Huaca de la Luna is a Moche pyramid built in stages so that each new construction encased the last, which preserved painted friezes that would otherwise have gone: excavation has opened several superimposed levels covered tier on tier in polychrome images of the fanged deity Ay Apaec in red, white, black and yellow, with processions of warriors and prisoners, and evidence of ritual sacrifice in an adjoining plaza.

On the northern edge of town the Huaca Arco Iris carries moulded friezes of an arching motif with serpent heads at either end, read as a rainbow and tied to rain and fertility in a place where water was everything; it lay buried under sand for centuries, which is exactly why the reliefs survived.

And on the Plaza de Armas, Trujillo Cathedral was built between 1647 and 1666 after earthquakes took the earlier church, yellow and white with two square bell towers, facing colonial mansions in strong colours behind the wrought-iron window grilles that are this city's signature.

You will string this set everywhere from a hard court in Trujillo to a beach court up at Huanchaco, twenty minutes north-west, and by the way, it is also perfect for an evening lap of the Plaza de Armas afterwards, which is the best-attended show in northern Peru and costs nothing at all.

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Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set

Head Lynx Touch 16g Tennis String Set