Sand dunes and snowboards

---

Hotel: Mossone Hotel (Huacachina, Peru) $60
An early start today at 5:30 as we needed to be at the bus station. The Ormeno bus was one of the medium range buses with regular seats; not the reclining leather sleeper seats like the long-distance buses. The AC was cranked up to max and the movies were blaring loudly as we headed through the endless suburbs of Lima before the scenery gave way to barren landscape. The road was in excellent shape, and the trip to Ica only took 3 hours. On arrival in Ica, we decided to go over to Huacachina, a resort town about 5 miles away that consists of a few buildings and a murky pool of water completely surrounded by towering sand dunes, some are hundreds of feet high! Ica is overrun with tuk-tuk taxis, here they are called taxi chico. We caught one over to Huacachina (paying twice as much as we should have!). Checked into the Hotel Mossone, a decent hotel with a lovely courtyard. There were several Peruvian families in Huacachina enjoying the holiday. One of the favorite activities in Huacachina is sand boarding, using a snowboard. We attempted a few times, but it definitely takes practice! After lunch by the lake, we went back to Ica for a few hours. There's not much to the town itself, but the people were wonderful, several people were really hamming it up for my wife's camera! We arranged a tour to the Nazca lines for the following day, and bought onward bus tickets to Arequipa for tomorrow night.

---