It’s friday 29th of June – a national holiday here in Perú. My alarm goes off at 5.10 a.m. Luckily I have everything packed so I just grab my bags and some food and head off to the Metropolitano station. It fooles me a bit – at first the station is closed even though the first bus should already go through and then the display shows the next line A bus, the only one working for me goes in 40 minutes. Fortunately it still arrives on time and I am at the train station at 6.20 a.m. In line I already meet a guy from France and a couple from Belgium.
(I’ll switch to past tense here) We were able to skip the relatively large crowd of people waiting to get in, because they already had a ticket and we didn’t. The luggage was checked with metal detectors according to the Indian system – if it beeps they either do nothing or open the bag, close it almost immediately and it’s approved. The ticket check is about the same. We just have a pdf printout, with our names and passport number – I don’t have my passport with me, but they don’t even check the name.
There are 6 passenger cars – 4 are touristic class with 48 very comfortable, inclinable seats each, air conditioning (with the caveat of sealed windows), luggage storage and access to the observation car featuring a bar and even an included Pisco Sour. The real backpackers of course met in the classic cars – it was about half the price, but also included breakfest and lunch, coca leaf tea and touristic information via speakers in Spanish, English and French. The seats were actually comfortable and we had tables and could open the windows to take pictures. It turned out one car was only for online bookings and the the tickets to “clasico 2” were those sold at travel agencies and in supermarkets. It turned out that our car was almost full of tourists, while the other one had many Peruvians on it. There were a few empty seats, but the train was generelly quite full. I was sitting together with a Polish couple, but since there were four empty seats next to ours they left and the Belgian couple I had met earlier joined me, because their seats pointed into the wrong direction.
The train took off only 10 minutes late, which doesn’t really matter on a 12-hour ride. The locomotive was honking all the time, because the track goes right through the city and there were people, dogs and cows on it. We went through some parts of Lima which are not recommended to walk as a tourist, although they are not really frightening. Even though we went very slowly the train was already shaking vigorously to all sides, it feels as if the track was just good enough for the cars not to derail.
The whole railroad was build from 1870 and the track until Huancayo was finished in 1907. It includes many zig-zack switchbacks to be able to climb those mountains and thousands of workers died in the extreme situations up in the Andes. It was built to transport goods and the bi-weekly passenger train just goes because the train company was caused to offer this service by the government. Nowadays it is a lot cheaper and faster to go by bus(they only need 8 hours and the cheapest ones cost 1/4 of the train fare).
Those 12 hours went by amazingly fast, I chatted with the Belgians a lot, we got our foot airplane-style (although I guess most stewardesses will never in their lives experience turbulences comparable to the shaking in the train), but it was good. When I used their window to snap some pictures I talked to a group of three from the U.S. and found out two of them were from California. I asked them were exactly and guess what – they had just finished their studies at the UCSB in Santa Barbara. The world is so incredibly small!
During the trip we made three “touristic stops” were we could get off and walk around for about 20 minutes each. At the first stop the most interesting thing was a turntable, where three men turned around the whole locomotive by hand – the train changed its direction. There were also some old locomotives we could climb on and ring the bell 🙂
The second stop was a nice village called “Matucana” with a nice center, markets and crowded of people. Some kids were waiting for a train to dance to “Moscow, moscow”, which was nice but somehow strange in terms of unexpected.
Of course the most impressive was our third stop at “Galera”, the highest train station in the world at 4781 meters above sea level. The nurse started walking around offering oxygen, but it seems as if nobody was really sick of the altitude in our car. The Californians (is that a word?) even dring half a bottle of Vodka – I guess that doesn’t really help. They don’t even have a place to stay in Huancayo and try to make calls from the phone. Actually we had cell coverage most of the time, but it was very loud and they spoke almost no Spanish. Additionally most of the hostels seem to be full as well as buses going back to Lima as most people only drive to Huancayo and not back during the night.
After Galera we descended to Huancayo which is at about 3300 meters going through “La Oroya”, a small town infamous as being among the 10 most polluted places in the world – the largely unregulated (even state-owned for most of the time) mining industry left a dirty legacy. Especially the still active smelter for copper and lead and the zinc mine lead to most of the pollution. Unfortunately we didn’t stop, but the river didn’t look like it actually contained water.
About an hour before they told us we would arrive I had called Marco to tell him when to expect me as he wanted to pick me up from the station. He is a local mountain guide who made his hobby a profession. He is recommended in several books and the people owning the place where I live in Lima recommended me to ask for him. When I was searching for hostels I thought about trying to couchsurf and his was one of the first profiles I stumbled across. We took a taxi to his house, which is really big and is really luxurious for Peruvian standards. The living room, kitchen and bathroom are very European and he has a whole room for Couchsurfers with three beds.
I was now starting to feel the altitude (headache) and I guess I should have eaten less. Marco was really nice and offered me a lot of things, but I just asked for coca leaf tea had a really good one from fresh leaves and went to bed very early. While it was really nice when we arrived during the night the temperature drops extremely to not much more than the freezing point and not even this house had any kind of heating or insulation, but I had enough blankets.
