The worst haircut in the world
But "in every bad thing, you'll find something beautiful," said the man in the turquoise llama poncho.
Why is it that whenever magazines pull together those rankings of influence – the top 100 most influential people in the world; the ten industries that run the world, etc – they never include hairdressers, or hairdressing?
Hairdressers, man. They have the power to make or break your day. No, month. Hell, maybe even year. And as the tagline for the dramatic first-person newspaper piece would go, I should know, it happened to me.
In ordinary London life, my hair magician is a talented French lady called Célestine (I know, the name alone makes you trust her). I’ll visit her three, maybe four times a year for a shearing – an amount a close friend once lambasted as excessive, but when your genes dictate that your hair grows predominantly outwards and not downwards, trust me it’s necessary.
For reasons I understand but still struggle to accept, Célestine cannot come travelling with me. And so my strategy has become to wait until I can stand it no longer (usually when we are somewhere especially hot and humid and my hair can no longer fit in any kind of hairband or clip) and throw the dice of fate.
Sounds a bit dramatic, you might say. Well just you wait.
The first haircut I had while travelling took place in Rio. The language barrier presented a bit of stress, but with help from some English, some Spanish, and some photos, my Portuguese-speaking hairdresser got the gist of what I wanted, then did what she felt like doing anyway. Luckily nothing too dramatic: her main concern (and source of much tutting and muttering under her breath) seemed to be the parched condition of my sun-bleached, sea-bedraggled mop. And so without consulting me she stuck on a keratin treatment (I think) and sat me under a steam-producing contraption for – I’m not joking – a full hour.
The end result was much shorter and more expensive than anticipated (I still don’t remember consenting to the steam treatment) but kind of great. My hair was tamed and the heat was instantly more bearable. One point to Brazilian hairdressing.
So you can see why, four months later, I was feeling relaxed about the prospect of another trim.
It happened in Lima. After a glorious week exploring Iquitos and the surrounding rainforest region, Dave and I had to engage rapid-travel mode and hotfoot it down through Peru in time to meet (Dave’s sister) Alice. And since the cargo ship route was expected to take at least another five days, we caved and booked a flight to Lima. Turns out you can cover a lot of ground by air! And no defecation in the aisles!
In Lima we had a few hours’ layover before another overnight bus south to Arequipa. And so I thought, what better use of time than to get a haircut?
I maintain that my Spanish was good. We discussed what I wanted, we examined photographs of my former, better-haired self. We definitely discussed what I didn’t want (layers) because of what I was already working with (curls, volume, chaos). So when I saw the hairdresser pick up a large chunk of hair directly from the top of my head and cut quite literally 18 inches off it, I was too stunned to react. I kid you not, the woman had effectively cut me a fringe at the back of my head.
I’ve had substandard haircuts before, of course I have. My childhood hairdresser was a lovely local woman who had about 14 other customers in her living room at any one time. She’d get distracted with all the gossiping and cut my eyelashes off on more than one occasion (when it finally happened to my mother too, she agreed we could try somewhere else). And as an adult, I’ve had to play the trial-and-error game all around London to find a hairdresser whose natural instinct isn’t to flatten curly hair and strip it of all its personality.
But this. This is the worst haircut I’ve had in my life, hands down. And I’m not taking it well.
In the moment, once I’d seen that first big chunk fall to the ground, there wasn’t much I felt I could do but sit it out in the hope that the hairdresser had a vision I just couldn’t grasp yet. Turns out she did have a vision, and the vision was one step removed from a mullet. As I stared at her reflection in the mirror to avoid my own, I noted, all too late, her own very 80’s-style cut. The warning signs were all there, and now she was making me in her own image. It would have been a full mullet had I not called time on the scissors once she got too close to my ears and face.
The only time I might have briefly considered a mullet was 11 years ago in Guatemala. I stayed in a hostel called Mr Mullet’s in San Pedro la Laguna, and the deal was that if you let the owner cut you a mullet, you got a free night’s stay (*disclaimer: I’m not sure if they still do this). Even then, I wasn’t that broke, but plenty of other people went for it. There was a sort of camaraderie around the town of white, mulleted men nodding to one another as they crossed paths in the queue for the vegetarian burger café.
There was no such camaraderie in the shopping centre, or indeed the bus station in Lima that night. When I left the hairdresser’s and saw Dave’s face, I’m not ashamed to admit I had a little cry. And then I moaned about it for much of the 18-hour bus down to Arequipa. Because exhausted comments like “well, at least you have hair!” didn’t land well. They still don’t. Because for me and for lots of women, hair is so much more than just hair! It’s an indicator of health and personality. It’s something to have fun with on a good day and hide behind on a bad day.
I’m willing to accept that hair does eventually grow out. Almost two weeks since the event, it’s on its way. And I know I’m lucky that in a few more weeks I’ll have so much hot frizz in my face again that I’ll have forgotten the trauma of Lima and will skip naively to the local salon that will once again make or break my day.
We spent an easy day and night pottering around Arequipa, a place we’ve visited before and loved so much that we visited many of the same haunts. We even booked the same Airbnb as last time, largely for its stellar rooftop laundry set-up.
The following day, we took yet another overnight bus – this one taking us across the border into Bolivia. But first we enjoyed a very classy dinner, Thai-Peruvian fusion at Kao Thai. Sitting on the table next to us was a giddy-faced young guy wearing a turquoise llama poncho. He started singing loudly and unselfconsciously to Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” and we thought to ourselves, “how annoying”.
In the lead up to catching the bus that night, I had a feeling I couldn't shake about being cold. Possibly not so obscure, since I am haunted by my friend Sally once telling that me her overriding memory of Bolivia was thinking she might die of cold on the overnight bus. But then, Sally's trip was over a decade ago and all the buses we've taken have tended to have some form of climate control.
Reader, the bus from Arequipa had no such thing. I wore my usual comfy bus clothes: tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt, with my Uniqlo jacket at the ready. Arequipa was warm in the daytime, but it was minus numbers out there in the desert and mountains. By some miracle Dave still had his hammock from the cargo ship inside his day bag and he tucked it round me very chivalrously. But the thing about hammocks is that they are generally made out of very thin cotton designed to keep you cool, so it didn’t stop the shivering. We tried to huddle, but the excellent quality of the Transzela seats came with a side-effect of fierce plastic privacy barriers between us. Even so, I could feel Dave shivering.
Eventually, I dozed off. But when I woke up again, it was still the middle of the night and the bus had stopped. Looking at the map, we’d only just made it out of the city – but we’d been stuck there for three hours, Dave informed me, broken down. We sat for another hour, until finally a replacement bus came to rescue us.
Standing outside in the desert watching our breath freeze around us while the new bus prepared itself for our embarkation, it occured to me that we were very unlikely to make the border crossing in the morning, and therefore most unlikely to make the connecting bus on to La Paz in time to meet Alice. Nobody seemed to know what was happening or why we weren’t on the road already.
Then a cheerful voice piped up from beneath a turquoise llama poncho: “Guys look at the stars!” Sure enough it was Aerosmith boy, and he and followed up the resulting silence with: “You know, in every bad thing, you'll find something beautiful if you look close enough. It's all part of the adventure.”
I won’t repeat here what I said. I was tired. It was -7 degrees centigrade. It occurred to me in that moment that none of us would survive this if it were a horror film, and least of all him. But you know what? I was so very wrong.
Rolling into Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, somewhere near the Bolivian border at around 7am, it was clear we’d long-missed our connecting bus outwards. To our surprise, representatives from the bus company made moves to assist us, possibly because there were so many people (maybe 11 of us) in the same position and most of us were gringos and one of the gringos was a six-foot-four German woman who wasn’t taking any shit.
It was decided that we would form a walking bus across town to the colectivo station, from where the bus company would commandeer cars for us and we would, and I quote, “catch up with the connecting bus” that had left the terminal three hours previously.
On the two-hour drive to the border that inevitably did not catch us up with the departed bus, Dave and I got chatting to turquoise llama poncho who threw an absolute curveball when he told us he was an Israeli soldier currently on a sabbatical from the IDF. Apparently they could call him back at any moment and he would have 72 hours to get there or face prison, which seemed risky considering how long it was taking us to simply get to the next town along.
He can’t have been older than 22 but he had clearly Seen Some Things and had a lot of opinions about the war as you might expect. Not all our politics aligned, sure, but he was very world-wise and vehemently anti the Israeli government. It was a fascinating conversation and I mentally retracted my thoughts from earlier that morning – despite his sweet voice and love of Aerosmith, he was absolutely the most equipped person in that car to survive any zombie apocalypse.
Cutting a long story slightly shorter, the border was pretty busy by the time we got there and we got to know the rest of our carmates well during our three hours of queuing for Bolivian immigration. Since Bolivia has adopted a hard ban on Israeli tourists, our poncho friend had taken a one-day trip to Chile and back to christen his suspiciously new and empty Czech passport, and was stamped through with the rest of us.
Finally, we climbed into another colectivo and did our best to politely avoid further conversation with the curious locals we were crammed in with, exhausted from the past 20+ hours of travel. Dave and I pulled into La Paz that evening around the same time as Alice’s flight was landing, and we scrambled to our apartment just in time to greet her. Reunited after ten months, the three of us headed out to celebrate with our first meal in what felt like a very long time.
Travel bits and tips from this week
Our flight from Iquitos to Lima was with Star Peru. It took a couple of hours, was way cheaper than the alternatives and felt like luxury after the cargo ship we’d taken to go the other way.
The worst haircut in the world took place at a misleadingly nice looking salon in this shopping centre near the bus terminal.
In Arequipa we returned to the same Airbnb we’d stayed in back in May because it was lovely and, oh my, that laundry set-up.
We went to frankly a weird number of cafés over the next 24 hours, including lunch at Capybara café, which has capybara themed… everything.
The following day I had an excellent coffee at Kafi Wasi, a rather douchey cafe. After we left, the waiter ran down the street to chase us and present us with complementary Kafi Wasi badges, which was a bit strange.
Lunch the second day was a three-course vegetarian tasting menu at Omphalos for I think £3 each. It’s set in a beautiful courtyard like many of the best places in Arequipa.
We also hung out at Tanta and La Despensa.
Dinner with Aerosmith was at Kao Thai, which we were definitely underdressed for.
When we finally got to La Paz we headed out for dinner at Manq'a restaurant. It was unbelievably good, especially since we’d basically not been able to eat anything for a full day during the border/bus trauma.
In La Paz we stayed in the cool Sopocachi area, which had excellent vibes. Our Airbnb was fine, but absolutely freezing despite the description and the bathroom plumbing was proper dodgy. I’ll spare you the details.
Rachel- Elaine here you parents’ neighbour in Portugal. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy your blogs! Beautifully written and make me laugh every time. Vicariously enjoying South America while I am back in Edinburgh for the summer(a loose term, it’s freezing!). Keep it up