Peru Hop
We haven’t had many stories to tell over the past 10 days or so because we’ve been sick. Right after we arrived in Huanchaco (a beach town outside the big city of Trujillo) we both got Montezuma’s Revenge (“the revenge”). It put us down for several days 🤢😱. Fortunately we had booked a small Airbnb apartment for a week so we had decent, private accommodations for this bout. I had gotten sick with the revenge earlier on in our travels and can tell you it’s really miserable when you’re riding on buses and staying in hostels with shared bathrooms 😆😂.
Since there’s not much to tell for Huanchaco, I’m gonna go back to some stories from when we first got to Peru (before we got the blog going).
We arrived in Lima on June 22nd at about 10:00pm, so we had already booked a hostel, called Tupac Hostel, near the airport. The ad for the place said it was safe and clean so we went for it. The room seemed like it was clean, but the neighborhood looked a little sketchy. The next morning we ate the continental breakfast that came with the $12 we had paid for our room. The cute young Peruvians that worked there were very friendly and wanted to get their picture made with us. I guess they don’t get a lot of “mature” American backpackers there!
After breakfast, we met two adorable young backpackers (Marianna and Lydia) from the Faroe Islands (Google it – these islands are absolutely beautiful). They had just arrived to Peru as well. We hadn’t had time to do any research or planning on where we were going so we asked the girls about their plans. They were so sweet to us and sort of took us under their wings because they had more experience at backpacking. They told us that they were going to use a bus system called Peru Hop to go to several interesting, cool places. They showed us how to use the app “HostelWorld” and told us that they had decided to move to a different hostel before they took off on their Peru Hop adventures. I think they probably didn’t get a good feeling about the hostel we had stayed the night and so they encouraged us to go stay at the new hostel they had chosen. It was so cute that they were looking out for us! So we decided we would move to the hostel they had chosen, called Pool Paradise, and then we’d look into the Peru Hop thing to see if maybe we would like to try it. So it really turned out to be good that we met our new friends because the Uber driver that drove us to Pool Paradise asked us why we were staying in in our first hostel and told us that it was very dangerous there! When we got to Pool Paradise we were just getting ready to call the girls and tell them to get the heck out of that other neighborhood when they walked through the door and we were so relieved!
Our new hostel, called Pool Paradise, was in Miraflores, which is a nice area of Lima so we were much happier there! The people who worked there were really friendly and helpful. Several of them had escaped from Venezuela (that’s another story). We stayed 3 night in an 8 person dorm there for a cost of $11 per bed per night. Here’s a picture of our beds 😃.
The next few nights and days we met lots of great people at Pool Paradise and made travel plans on Peru Hop. We walked downtown with the girls one day and took them to lunch for being so sweet to us. At lunch we decided that we could all adopt each other and that we would be their travel parents 😁. We saw the girls several more times during the next few weeks of travel (more to come on that) and it was funny because some people ended up thinking that we were actually a family 😂.
