Peru, Day 7: Huancayo, Here We Come

We trained to Huancayo on a Friday. I remember because the train only goes on a Friday. The purpose of the Huancayo leg of our journey was the train ride rather than the destination. My parents rode the train 30+ years ago when it went up every week and basically only locals rode it, and my mother’s horror stories of the chicken claw soup they were served (claw intact) made this an experience not to be missed! Were they still serving the chicken claw soup? (We didn’t seriously believe they were). At the time my parents rode the train to Huancayo, it was the highest elevation train in the world. It took 38 years to build the rail line, which opened in 1908, and it’s considered a mighty feat of engineering. It travels from sea level up to about 15,000 feet above sea level before arriving at Huancayo, which is at about 11,000 feet above sea level. It has 56 bridges, some over spectacular ravines, 69 tunnels, a dozen switchbacks (zig-zags). It doesn’t curve around the mountains, it goes back and forth up the mountains. So there are many times when you look out your window and see two sets of tracks. One set that you were just on, and the next set to take you up further. It was very cool!

Steve as we prepare to leave the Lima train station.

When I first started researching the train trip, I couldn’t find any information. It wasn’t in my Frommer’s Peru, and an Internet search turned up zilch. But my mother insisted that this train existed, and so I continued searching. It was one of the highlights of their trip. Why would we want to miss it?

The outskirts of Lima, typical neighborhood. The train is traveling backwards at this point.

Six months passed, and I began researching again. Turned out the reason I couldn’t find information the first time was because the train closed for at least 15 years at some point after my parents’ visit. It only takes 6 hours to travel to Huancayo by bus now, so why have the train? For the historical value! Thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of some devoted individuals, the historical train to Huancayo began running again less than a handful of years ago, but the schedule wasn’t set in stone. By a long shot.

At the first stop after Lima. The passengers get out, shake hands, and B.S. while workers prepare to turn around the train engine around on this huge turnstile.
Turning the engine. After this point, the train traveled forward all the way to Huancayo.

Eventually, as our trip neared, we discovered that the train was now running once a month. We quickly booked the best time for us and designed the rest of our trip around our weekend train ride. As it so happened, the train went up on a Friday on the weekend we booked and traveled back down on the Sunday night at 7 p.m. Other weekends, it runs back down on the Monday during the day.

One of the dozens of tunnels we traveled through. Note the two sets of train tracks. Things had slowed to a crawl as the workers prepared to move the train off one track and onto the next. In this fashion, we zig-zagged up the mountains.
The bar car, the access point for great pictures!
Chugging along. Taken from the bar car as we rounded one of the multitude of curves.

The train is now called the highest “historical” elevation train in the world, because the pan-Himalayan line which runs across Tibet, built in 2005, now climbs to over 16,000 feet. But! The Huancayo train still has the highest elevation stop in the world at which passengers can get out and pass out from the thin oxygen in the air, if they so choose. The Peruvians are very proud of this (as they should be; it’s fun to watch gringos pass out). The Peruvian train is the “original” highest-elevation train in the world. Because it was built over a century ago, it has historical significance. Honestly, it’s an experience not to be missed. If we had to sacrifice visiting Arequipa to ride this train, so be it. The only tourists we met during our entire 3 weeks who’d even heard of the train to Huancayo were the people ON the train.

Steve got out at 15,000 feet elevation. I got out, too, but after two steps I became very dizzy, so I went back in with the excuse that it was hailing. No idea who took this photo!

Now, the train is running twice a month. So hopefully more and more people will discover it. It was a blast.

These days, the DH and I were able to choose to pay a bit more and travel in the tourist cars—more comfortable seating and a bar car! Other tourists from around the world were with us, but Peruvians were with us, as well. No chicken claw soup! I can no longer remember what we were served or how much of it I ate, but I made sure to take advantage of the coca tea in the bar car (a hot drink that helps you deal with altitude sickness). We’d also bought sorochi (spelling?) tablets at a Lima pharmacy, which also help with altitude sickness.

I hadn’t traveled on a train since we backpacked through Europe in 1981. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy train travel. We got to know other passengers, and the most delightful passenger was a little Peruvian boy named Fabian who sat across the aisle from us with his mother (his father was a few seats back). Fabian didn’t know a lick of English, and neither did his mom. We didn’t know a lick of Spanish. But the DH had his handy-dandy English-Spanish phrase book, and a great deal of this 12-13 hour ride to Huancayo consisted of attempting to converse with Fabian because he totally loved my DH (as most children do) and wanted to know where we were from, how old we were, etc., etc. He was, quite simply, adorable.

The illustrious Fabian. Note his snow pants! At first we thought he wore them just because he's a kid and that's what kids do. But when we arrived at Huancayo with only our fleeces on, Fabian's mom dressed him in a snow jacket and gloves and then donned the same herself. It think it's fair to assume that Peruvians and Canadians differ in their estimations of "cold."
More zig-zagging tracks.
Peruvians have a thing with putting stuff on their roofs. This roof is fairly empty. Outside of Lima and as we traveled to Huancayo, we saw tons of roofs with all sorts of stuff all over them. Bricks, old chairs, dogs, anything, it seemed, to keep the roof on. Note the funky looking mountain in the distance? It looked like melted marshmallows. No idea why it looks like that.

By the time we arrived in Huancayo, it was just after 7 p.m. and we were exhausted. We quickly found our hotel and bunked in for the night. We also decided that 9 p.m. on a Friday night was the perfect time to arrange our first attempt at getting our laundry done in Peru. The laundry guy came and took our bag of stuff, promising we’d have it back by 9 p.m. Saturday night. Hah! We did not see our laundry again until a couple hours before leaving for the train again late Sunday afternoon. And it took several conversations—with an interpreter—to get it back intact. Adventures in Laundering. We learned a valuable lesson. When hotel personnel takes away your laundry in Peru, that doesn’t mean the laundry is washed IN the hotel. Take note! (You can just sense a Trip Tip coming, can’t you?). Next time!

By Cindy

I'm irritated because my posts won't publish.

4 comments

  1. Fascinating! And Fabian is so cute. Funny about the snow pants. When my sister first moved to Phoenix, she wore shorts in winter. Now she complains when the temperature reaches 50 degrees. You can imagine how much sympathy she gets from me.

  2. Isn’t he adorable, Edie? You should have heard him trill his R’s! He was simply a delightful little boy. Maybe one whine out of a 13-hour trip.

    LOL on your sister. Yes, we get acclimitized, don’t we? My parents live in the Baja in the winter, which doesn’t get anywhere near as hot as Zihautenejo, where they wintered for 16 years, and still when they come home my mom mentions how “cold” it is here in April. Mind you, it can get pretty chilly, but it’s not like it’s January!

  3. Thanks, Natalie! I’m taking a little break next week. I’ll still be blogging, but not about Peru. We have two family birthdays this weekend, so I won’t have time to write up the posts and do the pictures. I’ll get back to Peru soon, though!

Comments are closed.