The hostel and some history

The people of this hostel are fascinating. It's amazing how, turned introspective by illness and un vieja largo I've become a sort of mirror for these fellow travelers to cast their images upon. There is the Japanese man who's been to 86 countries over the last two years, who sets out to ‘get’ countries, a former copyright lawyer who is silent by day and a party animal by night. He told me happily one night, in between calling people d%&kface and asking woman if they want to make F&*% with him, that nothing impresses him anymore, and he only cares about chicks and drinking. He studies Portuguese during the day, we converse in my limited Japanese, I make a mistake, and he calls me Chimpugao! But he feels an affinity for me, perhaps because I lived in Kyoto and one of the first things I said to him was 'nihon ryoori wa totemo oishi desu nee?' He's done ayahuasca twenty times while living in Columbia, and he told me the times he did it without a shaman, like once in a nightclub playing noise music, he really wanted to kill himself; I suppose some of the other times with a shaman were far better, as he kept coming back. His electronic ensemble gives him instant access to any gathering - he's got fourteen thousand songs on a beat-up ipod that's seen its fair share of the world. He is hilarious.
Then there's the Irish couple, also quiet in the day, the bloke thumbing through a biography of some footballer, the lass a worn novella of some sort. At night, she disappears immediately and he becomes belligerent with drink - though again, never towards me. One unsteady night he struggled to play jinga with the last vestiges of the guests and myself, as the birdsong was just beginning over the tile-topped walls of the courtyard. Failing, he turned to me suddenly and whispered 'you're quite cool, mate.' I struggled not to laugh, failed, and somehow got him to laugh with me.
There are these four Australians, three men and a woman, who have been playing out a kind of drunken soap opera for the past few days, each confiding in me as I sit silently, nodding, inwardly grimacing, that love is a this and who-needs-desperate-housewives-that. The convolutions of the tale would be too high a word count for this entry, but suffice to say it's been going on for months and they seem to derive some kind of pleasure from it - because they still travel together. The men resemble large children, leprechaun-like and history-less, while the woman is an ex horse-trainer turned bar tender with a friendly nature that seems to get her in trouble.
Then there are the ones who seem to take their situation a bit too seriously, like the dangers of the hostel in Peru are unfathomable yet ever-present, and they must remain vigilant, trusting no one. These are the ones who don't leave often but prefer to stay on their bunk beds eyeing their things and checking their pockets for their wallets: they tie their food up inside the plastic bags they buy it in, and then struggle to write their names legibly across the obstinate plastic, proceeding to secure a place at the back of the lowest shelve in the refrigerator where they hope the food-thieves won't think to look.
There are also the new arrivals who enter the room in the middle of the night, earn a few groggy hellos, and are gone before anyone wakes up - the only proof of their existence being a slept-in bed and half-remembered, dream-like shadow-images.
There were two Polish girls who had been traveling awhile, and had come to Lima to meet a kind of modern pen-pal one of them had been fostering for two years. He was a very interesting biologist who'd studied capybara dispersal and mapped macaw salt-licks, spending up to three months in the jungle alone, with tales of a Puma tracking him for three days and encounters with natives. Five hours and many drinks after they met I heard from my bed a passionate conversation in which the poor guy, obviously too drunk and a bit inexperienced, exclaimed 'So what do you think about me? Yes or no?!'
He left without saying goodbye to anyone - and I'm going to write his story.
Along with the many interesting people I've met, the cycle of the hostel itself has been interesting to experience, the rotation of people from different countries, each coming to try out things that were tried the day before by others, all of their reactions different but collected, like a field full of a single species of flower, all of them different upon closer examination because of the ground they grew from.
The extinction of the mega fauna of South America occurred with the last glaciations that saw the rise of the Central American isthmus, after which cross-migration brought human predators south and we commenced to hunt everything to the tip of Patagonia and extinction. The Megatherium, or giant sloth, was one of these beasts, an herbivore that stood twenty feet tall on its hind legs and weighed five tons. Saber tooth tigers could not hunt it for its size and the toughness of its hide. Reports from the end of the 19th century claimed to have spotted lumbering hulks of fur resembling the Megatherium, an animal that was impervious to the bullets the explorers fired on it, in southern Patagonia…