Sand boarding and dune buggies

The bus from Lima dropped us in Ica, which is about 10mins cab ride from Haucachina. In Ica thay have these little 3 wheeled taxi that take you around the town (see the pictures), i wanted one of these but we ended up getting in a crappy little mazda or something after the diver wouldn´t stop hassling us. Very disappointing.

Huacachina is a small town that surrounds an oasis in the middle of some fairly significant sand dunes. From the outside the town looks very impressive, however once your atground zero it is very similar to rest of Peru, unpaved roads and smells liek urine. We stayed in the first place listed in the Lonely Planet ´La Casa de Arena´, it was a good place with a pool and a bar and a huge sand dune directly behind the hostal.

If anyone is coming to Huacachina stay here it´s a great place to go dune buggying then sit in the sun by the pool and sink cans (stubbies actually). Great fun. Plus they have lots of random dogs walking around (i like hounds) and many women in bikinis (even a ripped up black man or two for sarah perve on!).

The main reason for comingto Huacachina is for the sandboarding. We organised a sun buggy tour that includes some sandboarding down the dunes, which appear to stretch as faras the eye can see, it looks quite amazing. The buggy tour was great fun, but i reckon he could have gone a little quicker, we didn´t get airbourne at any stage, but still managed to eat a fair bit sand, so that was nice, i felt like a small child again. We had quite a bit of time sandboarding, actually much more than i expected, which was good.

 The buggy drops you at the top of the dune with a snowboard looking piece of wood in your hand and down you go lying, sitting or standing. The guide lubes up the bottom of your board with wax every so often, you need this, or its snails pace for you. The majority of people went down on their stomachs and there wasn´t too many stacks, there was a couple though that were good to watch. Sarah was little scarred after some not too good times down the volcano in pucon on the backside, but she mastered the board without too many problems and was loving it by the end. We both returned to the hostal covered in sand and quickly deposited it in the pool at the hostal, they must love everyone doing that.

The only disppointing bit of the buggy tour was the amount of rubbish spread throughout the dunes. It appears that rubbish flys out of the buggies or gets blown from thetown onto the dunes, however it appears that there is no system for picking it up. It is the only real blight on the beauty of the endless espanse of dunes.

We left Huacachina that afternoon for Nazca to see the freeky Nazca lines. Were they made by an acient civilisation, aliens or somethign more sinister, wait to find out......