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Published: March 11th 2007
A well-earned beer
Jule finally gets her reward for setting up the website!Well, I´m delighted to say that we finally escaped Pisco (after quite a fun night out on the town, I must admit) and hopped on a bus to Ica. We didn´t hang around there (yet another crazy, wild west kind-of-a town) but caught a taxi straight to the resort of Hauchachina, a natural lagoon surrounded by mountainous sand dunes. We checked into the creatively-named Hauchachinero hotel, complete with pool, as recommended by some English people we met on the bus. It wasn´t the cheapest place to stay but, well, just look at the photos. Not exactly your average backpackers is it?
Other than lazing by the pool and drinking cold beer, the main activity undertaken at Huachachina is sandboarding and dune-buggying, which we attempted on our second day. It was fantastic!!! Unbeknown to us our hotel (who we did the tour with cos they gave us discount off the room) had the most powerful buggies which meant that they could tackle almost vertical dunes - and tackle them we did, almost to the point of rolling over (they´ve got roll bars though, which is reassuring, ha ha). Our maniac driver seemed to take great delight in our squeals as he
Us and lots of sand
(That´s Ica in the background) topsy-turvied us over the most gigantic lumps of sand.
Then came the sandboarding, which was a hoot. I opted for the belly position (remember to keep your mouth closed) while Al had a couple of attempts at the ´proper´moves. Apparently it´s very different to snowboarding (not that we´ve tried that before either, though I would guess it´s a tad colder). Needless to say, the sand gets everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I have a feeling we´ll still be shaking it from our nether regions for months to come!..
We rounded off the trip by watching the sun go down over the dunes, an altogether awesome experience, though everyone agreed a few cold beers wouldn´t have gone amiss. I have to say the desert just blew me away. It is just so incredibly vast, graceful and serene - and summoned up much-loved romantic images from my childhood... of the Turkish Delight advert (or is that just me?).
After that we spent a couple more days in Huachachina meeting and hanging out with a variety of very cool and interesting people from all around the globe, including Dothi, our Irish host from the Loki Hostel in Lima, who was
taking a few days out to visit other hostels, drop off flyers etc. I promised we would give him a plug on our blog so here it is - www.lokihostel.com - if you´re going to Lima we recommend you stay there, it´s clean, smart and in a great location (you can owe us that beer mate!). It was a real international little group, so hello to our new English, Irish, German and Norwegian pals and not forgetting of course Roger and Lauren, or rather Santa and Mrs Claus who were on vacation after yet another hectic season!
All in all a very pleasant few days holiday from our holiday. Oh yes, and I got to practise my Spanish... with a parrot!!
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