This is the story about how me and my dear friend Kate found ourselves standing outside of our hostel in Peru at 12:30am with no way to enter or to access any of our possessions.
I’ll have to start from the very beginning to help you understand how we ended up here. The story starts with us meeting two English boys in the Amazon Rainforest on our tour. Instantly, we all connected and became a really awesome squad.
They left the rainforest a day before us and were headed to Cusco, which worked out nicely to be our next stop as well. Once in Cusco, we met up with them again to hit a few clubs and explore the nightlife.
One thing led to another and we ended up staying out with those boys until 5am! So scandalous… However, we made it back to our respective hostels and all slept in our own beds. Kate and I had to catch our bus to Ollantaytambo at 9am the next day, so this was the end of our time all together.
We (like zombies) made our 2hr bus and got to Ollantaytambo. I LOVED this city so much, even if we were so tired and hungover. Midday, we get an Instagram DM that they boys had decided to follow us to Ollantaytambo to get to spend one more day with us. Imagine our surprise!
They even ACTUALLY showed up and weren’t just bluffing. We genuinely were too stunned for words. However, we really enjoyed spending time with them and were happy to have 2 more friends with us to explore this city.
We grabbed dinner and payed cards for a few hours in a small bar. At this point of the night, I was so tired I didn’t even feel like I was alive anymore. Pretty sure I was dozing off with my head against the wall while sitting up.
Eventually we decide to leave and head home once again. The gentlemen walk us to our hostel and as we are saying goodbye again, we quickly realize the door is padlocked shut. We start knocking on the door and looking for any sort of intercom or hidden entry with no luck. We even got to the point of desperation of texting people on Hostelworld begging them to let us in, which was also unsuccessful.
Not only are we basically homeless for the night, but reception was not going to open again until 7:00am the next day. We had bus tickets to go to Machu Picchu at 5:30am, and would not be coming back to stay another night in Ollantaytambo. This meant that we would have no way of accessing any of our possessions before the check out of time of the hostel and leaving the city <3
For a situation that was borderline emergency level, we really were not that stressed. I think when really strange things like this happen while backpacking, you just have to kind of throw it to the universe that things will work out one way or another.
THANKFULLY, these boys had decided to come and we had a place we could go so we wouldn’t be sleeping on the side of the road overnight. Had they not decided to come, I don’t know what we would have done here.
Our next day timeline looked like: 5:30am train to Aguas Calientes (1.5-2hr), 2-3hr hike from there to Machu Picchu, and 11am entry time for our tickets to see the ruins. Kate woke up before me and decided to return to our hostel and start calling any number she could find and bang on doors until someone let her in.
It wasn’t until she got let in in that she realized the key to our room was in my purse with me, and not with her. Truly this entire predicament was humbling above all else. She began furiously throwing all of our items into our bags at 5am.
I called her and basically was like hey, we need to just take a second here and really think all of this through. What were we even going to do with our bags once we checked out and went to Machu Picchu. Hike the 3 hours with everything on us? Additionally, I knew there was no way we were going to make the 5:30 train at this point.
Kate and I put our heads together and decided we did need some time to recuperate and figure out what in the world was going on. I returned to our room and we decided that- based on the lack of sleep over the last 2 nights and our general sense of feeling unwell on many levels- a 2-3 hour strenuous hike was a terrible idea.
We bought later train tickets that allowed us enough time to sleep a bit longer, refresh ourselves, and take our time making our way to the train station. Then we caught a bus from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu and still made it in time for our 11am entry slot to explore everything.
As for our bags, our 2 besties came in clutch and transported our luggage back with them to Cusco. Once we made it back to Cusco after our adventures of the day, we collected our bags, and never saw those guys again.
In conclusion, the true kicker of this story is that allegedly there was an intercom button that would’ve immediately let us into our hostel that night had we seen it! So we got no sort of compensation for being locked out because of this<3 Just two dumb girls exploring the world honestly….
