Sandboarding!!

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Saturday 3rd May
We arrived at Huayhuchina around 3 in the afternoon and set off on our overnight excursion into the Atacama desert at 4. I had been tempted into this excursion because we were spending the night under the stars in the desert but I didn't really know what I was letting myself in for. It was a dune buggy ride and sandboarding. We got into the dune buggies, there were 8 people in the one I was in and I sat at the back in the middle. Our driver set off and we were immediately hurtling through the desert dunes. It was literally like a rollercoaster ride, we were going so fast and driving up and down and round dunes. We were all screaming like mad especially when we got to the top of a sand dune, paused and then hurtled down it!! I was so scared and yet was loving it too! I couldn't believe I was doing this, I would never even go on a rollercoaster at home! The desert was beautiful, we were surrounded by miles of sand dunes and it all looked so smooth.

We stopped at the top of a fairly small sand dune and got our sandboards out. I had decided I would try this one and if I didn't like it I wouldn't do any of the others. In turn we lay down on the sandboards, held onto the straps, tucked our elbows in and kept our legs wide to use our feet as brakes and our guides set us off. Then we slid down the dunes on a sandboard! The first one was fine, it wasn't as steep as I thought it would be and it was good fun. So I decided to do the next one and ended up doing them all. They got gradually bigger and faster but they weren't that scary and it was great! It was thrilling to whizz down them! We saw the sunset over the desert and then quickly went down another dune twice before the sun went down. Then we drove to our camp. Our camp was literally in the middle of the desert. There was no buildings there, just us, a campfire, our sleeping bags and our duen buggies. We had a cook with us who cooked for us and we sat around the campfire and were plied with drinks! I didn't drink much though and a bit later a few of us moved away from the campfire and curled up in our sleeping bags under the stars to sleep. It was amazing to think that we were sleeping in the desert completely surrounded by the stars and sand. Unfortunately I couldn't really sleep because off all the noise from the people around the campfire but i just looked up at the millions of stars until I fell asleep. We woke as the sunrose and set off on the dune buggies back to the oasis. The dune buggy took us for an early morning rollercoaster ride back to town. I was so impressed that I had done the excursion and enjoyed it!!

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