I left Lima early on Friday morning and enjoyed a stupendous eight-hour bus ride east to Huancayo, up in the mountains. Nice food served, a club-class seat and fantastic views, the highlights of which I managed to capture on video. I didn’t take any actual photos, and indeed this is a photo-free update, but before too long I’ll make up for it with that compilation of video highlights I mentioned last time.
Unfortunately things went a bit wrong in Huancayo. I had altitude sickness, much more than previously, having ascended 11,000 feet in just half a day. Also, at night it gets really cold here; and I only learned very belatedly that most of the hotels, including the one I was in, don’t have any kind of heating at all. (I guess that explains that the complete absence of other tourists. How come I didn’t know this?) There wasn’t even some kind of fan heater I could borrow. So I hunkered down as best as I could, under two beds’ worth of blankets, but it was a tortuous night and I woke up with a really bad chill, aching all over and feeling utterly rotten. Fortunately I’m not a wussy female character in an 18th-century Romantic novel, and as such a chill isn’t a near-death experience, but I couldn’t face going outside so I just lay in bed and watched all the footy.
Transferred myself at lunchtime to the Hotel Presidente (oh yes) for my second night, where even at 70 dollars a night they don’t have central heating, but they did manage to rustle up a portable radiator and that has sufficed. However the combination of altitude sickness, the chill, and some ongoing digestive issues rendered me unable to do anything today other than just sweat and shiver and ache under the blankets. (Incidentally this bed is the biggest I’ve ever seen. I reckon Rod Stewart could have fitted all five Nolan sisters in it, back in the day. Maybe even the Weathergirls, at a pinch.)
Also there was an unfortunate incident on my first night in Huancayo. Walking back from a café to my hotel, at night, I passed a young couple who were having a heated argument by a wall at the edge of the plaza. Well, when I say ‘heated’, what I mean is, he was snarling at her and she was silent. Then he slapped her a couple of times. For a brief moment I was the only other person within about twenty yards, and I hesitated for half a second only because I really did not know the turf. But then people starting rushing in from all over the place and the guy got roughed up a bit (not nearly enough) by the mob. Presently some kind of police/security guy appeared and everything calmed down.
Depressingly, but predictably, the outcome was that the girl pleaded for the bloke to be forgiven: she placed herself between him and the crowd, and she dragged him away round the corner and there was an end of it.
I should have moved quicker when it first happened. He obviously wasn’t any kind of tough nut, he was just a pudgy little spiv and certainly he had no backup waiting in the wings. It would have been worth a night in a Peruvian jail cell just to have flattened his greasy fat face and then stomped all over it. My Cat boots were ideally suited to the latter purpose.
But I think I would have been even less useful here in a fight than normal (and that’s saying something), because it’s 11,000 feet above sea level and at the time of the above incident I’d only just got there, fresh from being at sea level in Lima earlier in the day. I was out of breath and dizzy just from unpacking my bags.
So it’s all a bit negative and I’m feeling ever so slightly sorry for myself. I could really use some home comforts right now, and being 6000 miles from anyone I know doesn’t help. ("One, two, three, aaahhh”). But that’s solo travelling for you: there are always ups and downs. My chill is already beginning to wear off, so I should soon be back on the road and off to somewhere a bit more gringo-friendly.
