It is quite an unusual story of how we found ourselves checking into the Way Inn Lodge about 40-minutes drive outside of Huaraz. A few weeks beforehand I’d been sitting in the bar of Loki back in Cusco and had a brief half-an-hour chat with Jessica from Louisiana. She was heading off to Machu Picchu the next day but she was talking about this fantastic getaway that she knew of in Huaraz. She even punched the URL into my browser to show me how nice it was. I’d not even heard of the town but since it got mentioned a few day’s later by someone else I wanted to include it in my itinerary of the North of Peru. Luckily this also coincided with Julia’s plans so I looked through Firefox’s history and made a reservation.
When I bus arrived in the early hours of the morning in Huaraz I gave the lodge a call and they arranged for a taxi to pick us up: at least this way we knew that the taxi driver knew exactly where the lodge was. We were greeted getting out of the taxi by Princess, one of the lodge’s dogs and then met the proprietress, Becks (English), for our check-in. She ran the lodge with her somewhat eccentric American (tautology?) partner, Jeff.
Way Inn Lodge
We were staying in the dorm – affectionately known as The Cave. It is probably the cutest dorm that I’ve ever seen and the fact that all the beds had goose-down duvets (or doonas as Julia referred to them) was an added bonus. Not since my stay in Posada del Sol way back in Humahuaca in Argentina have I been so impressed by the aesthetics of my accommodation.
Since we hadn’t stayed the previous evening we had to pay for breakfast and both ordered the pancakes with fruit salad – our food bill was destined to be 3-times the price of our accommodation. The pancakes were so nice that even one of the local dogs whipped a pancake off my plate when I went off to get the syrup. Julia bumped into Brigid, a German woman that she’d last seen when she was doing the Colca Canyon and then I ran into Jessica who I’d originally got the recommendation from. She was relaxing there before returning to the US.
In the morning we just chilled out reading in the hammocks and after lunch (some home-made pita bread filled with vegetables and a side of delicious humus). In the afternoon we decided to take the short and easy trek to the Rio Cojup but we went the wrong way from the very beginning and after trying to rectify our mistakes but getting nowhere we eventually gave up. We’d already walked for 2 hours and ended up back at the lodge and the whole trek was supposed to be 2.5 hours. The dogs from the lodge, Princess and Albert accompanied us for most of the walk but even they seemed to give up with our dithering manoeuvres and headed back to the lodge long before us.
Sheep on our aborted hike
In the evening we had dinner with the other residents – Jessica, Brigid, Sarah (an English woman who helped out at the lodge) and an Irish couple (Bill and Laura). After dinner we played Janiv with Jessica, Brigid and Sarah but eventually only Julia and I were left playing. Julia introduced some new rules that I didn’t know about yet (if your score reached a multiple of 50 it was halved) but I eventually managed to beat her.
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