Huancayo Doesn’t Want You Here.

Friends and Family;

I thought I could shake up the scaredy train with a little bit of an interesting anecdote.

Ready?

I arrived late last night in a little (only 300,000 people, y’know, the entire Niagara Region shoved into a small valley with limited water and lovely countryside) city, just 7 hours outside of Lima.  Well, I say 7 hours, but that is the google maps estimate.  The actual time it took us was closer to 10.  In other words, an Adam Sandler movie, two Jennifer Lopez movies, a Michael Bay movie and a Channing Tatum movie.  That was a fun bus ride to spend with a book that I’d already finished.  The hostel I was staying at beforehand had a book swap but it also only had the Illiad in Spanish.  Not high on my list of books to read in the near future that I’ll never understand.

In other words it was a fun bus ride.

So I arrived in Huancayo at the central (not really central) bus station and hopped in a cab that cost me 7 soles (a far cry from the 5 it should have cost me) and ventured forth into the bowels of Huancayo to find this quaint little hostel recommended by the Lonely Planet guide.  I got to the hostel and was dropped off.  I sat my bags down and rang the bell.

No answer.

I rang the bell again.  I banged on the door.  I walked around the block trying to find a second entrance.  No such second entrance presented itself.

It is now 12 in the morning.

I am stuck in a city I don’t know, in a country I don’t know, where some of the advice on Huancayo in the Lonely Planet guide said that it’s probably not a good idea to stay on the streets past dark.

Brilliant.

I remember I have enough money for one call left on the Peruvian SIM card that I got in Lima before heading inland.  I will now never go without such a thing ever again.  I called the number in the Lonely Planet book.  Thankfully there was an answer.

I explained to the man that I had a reservation and that I’d like to come in please.  He told me to press the doorbell, which I had done several times beforehand, and I explained this to him.  He told me to hit it again, and then my phone cut off.  It seems at this point that he’s hung up on me, but I realize that my phone ran out of money halfway through the call because when I tried to call back I got the message saying “your phone is out of money.”  I am really hoping at this point that he’s got the message.  I sit down on a park bench and resolve to wait 20 minutes.  If nobody comes by that time, I’d find a cab and go stay somewhere else.

Thankfully the manager of the establishment swings by and lets me in, where we subsequently wake up two Swiss girls staying in the same dorm.  I crash and spend a night that feels like I’ve spent all night looking at the wall, and not actually unconscious at all.

So there you go.  My first interesting twist on hostels.  I learned later that the hostel’s reservation system is run out of their twin property in the city, and they failed to communicate the reservation.

Brilliant eh?

Anyway I’m fine, and paying 75 cents for an hour of internet to let the world know my interesting story.

Don’t worry though, I’m still having fun!