Getting Held Hostage by Laundry in Mexico

When we arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas, a highland town in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas, we desperately needed to do laundry after three weeks of traveling. We went straight to a laundrette after checking in on Friday and were told we could pick up our clothes the following day. Sounds easy enough, right?

We were already regretting putting that laundry in as it had all of our warmer layers in it. San Cristobal was high up in the mountains and it was bloody cold! Having just spent a week in the roasting hot beaches of Puerto Escondido and getting acclimatised to the Mexican heat throughout the trip, this sudden drop in temperature was quite a shock to the system! I was feeling rather stupid walking around shivering in a summer dress paired with hiking boots and a pashmina for warmth. “Oh well, it’s OK, we’ll get our clothes back tomorrow!” our teeth chattered.

Or so we thought.

When we had given in our clothes, we were asked to write down a time that we would be back for them on a slip of paper. We had a day trip booked on Saturday, so we wrote down a time a couple of hours after we were meant to return to be on the safe side.

Not safe enough! Our day trip journey home went horribly wrong, and we ended up back in San Cristobal over three hours late, missing the time we had written. Not to worry, I thought, the laundrette would still be open. I didn’t close till 8 pm it said outside. But at 6 pm we arrived at closed shutters. We rang the bell and waited outside, banging on the shutters for half an hour before giving up and realising that we would have to return the next morning for our clothes.

Many of the laundrettes we noticed also have second-hand clothes hanging up for sale. We often joked that these must be from tourists who left them behind and that when we go back tomorrow, we’ll have to buy our own clothes back. Halfway through the joking, we had the horrible realisation that, no, we wouldn’t be able to get our clothes tomorrow. Everything closes in Mexico on a Sunday! And sure enough, the laundrette was closed the following day.

We were leaving on Monday morning; our bus was booked for 11 am.

The laundrette was meant to open at 9 am, we rushed there the second it opened. Only it didn’t open. The shutters were down, and nobody was there. We rang and hammered to no avail. Right, we decided to go back to the hostel, pack what we had, check out and then try again.

When we came back the shutters were still down and there was an old lady outside, she told us to come back in half an hour.

We returned in half an hour, and she was behind the counter with a young boy who was about 9 years old. I showed her the slip which she couldn’t read but the boy helped her. They gave us our bag of laundry which we gratefully took and rushed off. Halfway down the street, we realised that this bag wasn’t all of it, we had given in far more than this.

We went back to explain that and spied a second see-through bag on the shelf, with clothes I recognised. This bag had no label on it, so she refused to give it to us. She said that this was her daughter’s business and that she couldn’t give us that bag until her daughter came back.

“When is she coming back?”

“I don’t know, maybe an hour or two?”

We tried to argue but to no avail. We walked back to the hostel, and I spluttered

“I can’t believe our laundry is being held fucking hostage!”

“Not even that, we’re being held hostage by the laundry, we’re trapped in this town till we get it back!”

Needless to say, we missed the only bus of the day and had to extend our stay by one night all just because of laundry.

At least that last night we were appropriately dressed for San Cristobal, finally…

We took this as a cautionary tale and for the rest of the trip we were mindful of Sundays and never did laundry anywhere we weren’t staying for a good chunk of time.

I’m never being held hostage by laundry again if I can help it!

Thank you for reading! Hearts and tips are always welcome and your support is very much appreciated.

This story was originally published on Medium

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