After my overnight bus to Huaraz I was feeling pretty drained. Even though I had slept about 8 hours on the bus, I was exhausted. I didn't really think much of it since I hadn't slept much the night before and I figured my sleep on the bus wasn't the most restful.
However as the day went on, I started to feel sick as well. I was achy all over, had a massive headache (though most of it was probably altitude sickness from being at an elevation of 10k feet,) a sore throat, and I was freezing.
As I mentioned, Huaraz was very cold at night and our hostel didn't have heat, but if you had seen me you would have thought I was dressed to go camping in the arctic. I was walking (and by walking I mean dragging myself at a glacial pace) around the hostel in Smartwool socks, with a pair of my new aforementioned alpaca socks on top of them, my Smartwool base layer pants and shirt, my North Face fleece, a knit hat, my Turtle Fur fleece neckwarmer, and gloves and I was still FREEZING. I went to sleep that night wearing all of those clothes, inside of my silk sleep sack, between two layers of thick flannel sheets and a heavy blanket. I was miserable. I woke up in the middle of the night DYING for water. I was clearly dehydrated from the altitude, but didn't have the energy to climb down off the top bunk and get my water bottle. After about two hours of literally having constant dreams about being extremely thirsty or drinking copious amounts of water I convinced myself to climb down and get my water bottle. I was weak from being sick alone, but the altitude exacerbated everything and even simple tasks were made much more difficult.
With the exception of Raphael forcing me out of bed to eat the lunch that he graciously trekked to the supermarket and cooked for me, I stayed in bed and slept until 5pm. At that point my fever broke and I woke up sweating.
I still didn't feel well though, and was determined not to spend another night in that town. While Huaraz is an amazing town during peak season with plenty to do, beautiful weather and great restaurants, it is completely dead in the off season. Raphael was planning to do Laguna 69 the next day, and though it's just a day hike, its fairly difficult.
Because you start at 10k feet, many hikers get serious altitude sickness and have to turn around. I could feel that I wasn't fully adjusted to the altitude yet, the ideal time is five days, and we'd only been there two, and I knew that if I attempted the hike when I wasn't feeling 100% there was no way I'd make it.
So, against Raphael's wishes, ("I have an obligation to your mother," he kept telling me,) I got back on another overnight bus and headed to Lima. My fever came back on the bus and the ride was pretty miserable.
I arrived in Lima at 5:30 in the morning. My first time alone since I'd been in South America. I knew my friend Jamie from the Ciudad Perdida trek was in Lima and he'd Facebooked me the name of his hostel. I tried to call the number from the bus terminal, but no one answered so I took a leap of faith and asked the cab to take me to the address. Unlike the hostel I had stayed at in Lima earlier in the week, this was further from the center of town. It was on a quiet street in an affluent neighborhood and must have been an old mansion.
When I arrived, I knocked on the door. No one answered. Feeling defeated, and miserably sick, I began to put my bags back in the cab to head to another hostel. Just as I was doing that, the door opened, and it was Jamie, still awake from the night before, coming outside for a cigarette... Pure coincidence and perfect timing. I couldn't have been happier to see him.
After tracking down hostel staff, I checked into a room. Though they couldn't give me a single, which I had requested only so that I could sleep uninterrupted, they gave me an 8 person dorm with a private bathroom all to myself. After deciding it was time to start antibiotics, it was my third day with a sore throat that continued to get worse, and taking two Advil, I climbed into bed dressed in my arctic wear.
When I woke back up, it was 6pm. I forced myself to walk the four blocks to the super market, mainly because I knew I was dehydrated, I had ran out of water, and you can't drink the tap water in Peru. I stocked up on soup, yogurt, granola bars, some apples, orange juice, water and gatorade, figuring it would be the only time I'd leave the hostel for the next few days.
When I got back, I had the people at the hostal take my temperature. As they checked the thermometer, they started to look really worried. "Oh wow," they told me. "It's at 40!"
40?!? What is 40? I knew it was high by the looks on their faces but whoever created the god damned celcius to farenheit conversion really screwed the rest of us with that complicated formula.
"You see, its supposed to be at 36," they told me, "but you're at forty." With that still meaning nothing to me, I took out my phone and Googled "40 degrees celcius to farenheit." 104 degrees.
Knowing that was high for an adult, I was a little bit more worried, but decided I didn't feel terrible enough to warrant my first trip to a South American clinic. Praying that the antibiotics would kick in by the morning, I promised the hostel staff that I would visit a clinic if I still had the fever in the morning. One of the owners was a mom and spoke English and promised me that I could wake her up in the middle of the night if I needed to go to the clinic or anything else.
The next morning, I woke up around 9am, sleeped out from basically doing nothing but sleeping for the past two days. As I made my way down for breakfast, I felt a bit better but not 100%. I met some guys at breakfast who mentioned they were going to go see a movie, which was pretty much the only thing I was up for.
I went up to take a shower - a monumental occasion in itself - my first in four days. I was so cold when I was sick that I literally couldn't imagine taking off any clothing to take a shower.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, hot showers in South America are incredibly rare and I was ecstatic when I learned we had them at the hostel. This shower, however, was SCALDING. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Usually when I shower, I get wet and then stand out if the water to soap up, stepping back in for as little time as possible to avoid water so cold it takes your breath away. In this shower I had to stand out of the water to avoid second degree burns. Nonetheless, after the shower I felt like a million bucks and went back downstairs ready to conquer the day. Antibiotics are truly a miracle.
* I would also like to thank my parents and brothers for constantly checking up on me, and some amazing friends back home, Anj, Stephen, Chris, and Chad for Googling travel clinics, safety tips in Lima, daily check ins and never ending messages of support and reminders to stay hydrated. Being sick away from home sucks, but you guys made it just a little better and made me feel loved from thousands of miles away.
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