After checking out Pisco and the Islas Ballestas, I took a two hour bus ride south to Ica. Ica is known for its wine and pisco producers, but my purpose was to visit the desert oasis of Huacachina.
Huacachina is a really relaxed village surrounding a lagoon, literally a desert oasis. Besides getting some time in at the pool, the best part about my time in Huacachina was taking a sand buggy tour through the dunes including several runs sandboarding.
First of all, keep in mind that this is Peru and safety is a bit of an after thought, but that also made the ride very enjoyable. Our crazy driver would go at top speed going up and down monstrous sand dunes. I thought we had big dunes in Michigan, but the dunes in Huacachina made Michigan´s seem like babies. Anyways, it is a bit hard to describe what the ride was like, but we basically just drove around the dunes at excessive speeds. We would go up a dune as fast as possible and then without slowing down to see what would be on the downslope we´d jump over the top and head back down. A blast.
The second part of the tour involved trying out sandboarding. Basically the same thing as snowboarding but you do it on sand. All of us in the group tried to do it standing up, but none of us could really get the hang of it so we switched to going down on our stomachs. Essentially just sledding headfirst down a giant sand dune. Again hard to describe, but a blast. Too give you some perspective as to how massive the dunes were that we went down, you can see some tiny people in the bottom left of the picture below who are at the bottom of the dune that we had just gone down on our boards.
Lastly, the dune tour ended with a sunset over the desert...amazing.
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