Waca waca waca Huachachina

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Part one of my plan went off without a hitch. Immediately on our return from the canyon I began racing around Arequipa in a series of tiny taxis. These little yellow boxes are everywhere buzzing through the streets and beeping their horns every fifty metres. They are so comically small that two people could probably lift one out of the way if it parked your car into a spot.

With the adrenaline pumping and my empty stomach growling, I did a mad repack of my bag and raced between the bus terminal and my hostel to secure a ticket. After wolfing down a massive rectangular pizza and thanking my landlady for her hospitality, I was on the 22:00 bus to Ica.

From Ica the plan was to zip out to the strangely located desert Oasis of Huacachina and jump into a buggy to go sandboarding down some enormous dunes. All of this on the recommendation of two most-excellent California girls from the trip out to Colca.

I had booked a “cama” bus with the intention of lying back on the huge bed seat and sleeping through the night but it turned out that I had wasted my money. Some crazed Argentinean guy got on just behind me and mumbled loudly to himself all the way to his seat - directly behind mine. It didn´t seem to matter that he had no one sitting next to him to talk to, he happily chatted to himself for eight of the next ten hours.
I followed the lead of the locals around me by not asking him to shut up (“When in Rome…”) and ground my teeth for most of the night.

This marked the starting point of my sleep deprivation experiment.

If I was looking for positives… at least I was awake for my first sighting of The Pacific Ocean. Bronzed local fishermen stood by the side of the highway, massive dripping fish hanging from their white-knuckled fists. I wondered how long they could hold them up like that waiting for a sale.

Rolling into Ica nice and early, I was hustled straight from the bus into a taxi to Huacachina (after haggling for a reasonable price). The most recommended hostel among those clinging to the Oasis was a disorganised concrete arrange ment centred around on a great swimming pool and bar. Some Swedish friends that I was to meet later would tell me how easy it was to slip into the rhythm of late-night drinks around the pool and lazy afternoons lounging in the sun but there was to be none of that for me…

I was checked in and had signed up for a dune buggy and sandboarding excursion by 09:00. I then checked out and stashed my bags in a room to avoid having to pay for the night since I would be gone again before sunset. A quick chat to my fellow dune adventurers and it was off to the waiting rocket.

We barely had time to clamber between the bright orange roll cage of our buggy and grasp at our harnesses before our psychotic driver brought the engine screaming to life. We were thrust back in our seats as he raced through the narrow asphalt streets to a point where he suddenly yanked the car up onto an embankment and out onto the sand. As he found even more gas under the pedal and we started getting air under the wheels, we recovered our composure and grinned madly at each other - this was going to be fun.

We were a group of ten but the others were a travelling band of Israelis so the load was not evenly spread between the buggies. Having only four passengers, our car was much faster and it leapt and slid all over the place, no complaints here. I quickly worked out that I had to maintain constant pressure with my feet and grip the roll cage above me to prevent what would have been a quick and painful pulping against the unforgiving frame.

We were really moving , if I turned my head to the side my sunglasses were ripped from my face and I had a couple of lucky catches there (slow learner). The ride quickly turned into a gravity-rush better than any rollercoaster has ever been able to deliver. The driver would shoot us up impossibly steep dunes and kill the gas as we cleared the peak and the nose-dived down the other side. As we floated out of our seats there was a lot of involuntary gleeful screaming and rapid, tugging adjustments to the very loose harnesses.
For all of the air that we got during those jumps, we all agreed that the best part was the unnatural sideways movement that we slipped into when our driver reefed the wheel hard to the right and left across the flats. All the while he would be grinning back at us manically, feeding off our excitement.

With a long, erratic skid we were tossed out onto the sand with our boards to have a crack at a seriously high and steep dune. The equipment was far better than I expected, we had full velcro bindings for the feet and each board got a thick layer of wax before we pointed them downhill. Deciding not to think about it for too long, I was first over the edge and quickly found that it required a lot of nerve to commit to a turn as you would triple your speed on the vertical transfer between edges.
Boom! Faceplant, plus about four somersaults. Welcome to Huacachina.

(Now, I know what you´re thinking… I´ve been limping around Arequipa and struggling to get up and down stairs with my damaged knee and then I go sandboarding? Honestly, my plan was to go in the buggy and just watch the boarding part but I had no pain at all that day and decided that I couldn´t pass it up once I was right there…)

My fellow buggy passengers were faring slightly better than me, one of them managing to carve out a graceful turn on the sand. Over the next few attempts (the buggy rocketed us back up to the top each time) we realised that practice didn´t necessarily improve our performance. It definitely improved our crashes though.
Having snowboarded before and rating myself a good chance to carve it up out here, I was relieved to find out that the Americans that I was struggling next to were professional snowboard instructors in Montana. Their cursing and crashing made me feel much better and I gave up chastising myself, improving with the relaxation.

On one of our brief waits at the bottom we watched one of the girls from the other group straddle her board and slide over the lip on her butt. We think that her intention was to use her feet as brakes but this only resulted in two impressive arcs of sand smashing her face for the whole way down. As she emerged from the cloud of her huge crash, she was spitting out great big balls of sand. That was the first and last seated-attempt for the day.

As we were packed back into the buggy, we thought we were done but were quickly delivered to a far bigger slope. We had been on the Green Run.
It was actually easier with a steeper angle and more time to the bottom and a few of us managed some half-competent turns with one hand dragging behind. Our Israeli friends were not faring so well but tackled the slope bravely, some of their crashes were worthy of applause.

Again, we thought that we were heading back to the Oasis but we stopped at one more monster dune where we were told that we could only do this one lying down, head first, on our boards.
This was pretty daunting as you could see that if just one bump caught the tip of the board… nose job. After a bit of milling about one of the snowboard instructors led the charge and we all soon followed her over the edge. It was fast and a great rush.
As I reached the bottom I had one of those memories that lie buried until you do something specific to jog them out of your brain:

- - -
Brandt, Austria - circa. 1986. A little version of me flying through the dark down a snow-covered road, sitting astride my father´s back. He is lying face down on an old wooden toboggan, his steaming breath whipping up and past me, a vapour trail of schnapps. This is how we would get home from the bar during our skiing holiday. Occasional controlled crashes into soft drifts at the side of the road saving us from the blades of snow-grading tractors roaring uphill in a blaze of light.
Good times!
- - -

Our final blurred escapade across the sand was the best yet with the driver letting himself off the leash to launch us off the face of the dunes at crazy angles. We happily observed that the other buggy was carrying far too much weight to fly around like ours.

We clung to our seats and prayed as we flew back across the town-limits and actually sped up with the improved grip. We made an all-or-nothing test of the brakes with a hair-raising stop inches from a taxi at the front of the hostel and piled out grinning from ear to ear.

After a swim to get rid of the layers of sand and a chat to my boarding friends in the sun by the pool, I was repacked, refueled and heading for the bus station.

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Photos

It´s a trap!
The lure of the Oasis.

All the gear...
...and no idea.

Hey baby...
I was itching to hit the gas and head straight for Lima.

The Black Run
(Steeper than it looks from this angle)

Comments

[PeteSarah]

Export Quality article
I've not read any of your others (yet) but this one is definitely of export quality. When I go back to Peru I'm gonna have to do some of that dune buggy stuff. It looks ace!! Keep up the good work, PeteSarah p.s. isn't TravelBlog great?