Kerri

Well that's lovely... somehow I managed to delete an entire journal entry with the push of one button. Starting over...

After our 11 hour bus ride to Ica/Huacachina, all we really wanted to do was sleep. Plus there wasn't much to do in our tiny oasis town in the sand dunes, anyway, at least until our sandboard and dune buggy tour later in the afternoon! Huacachina is essentially a tiny oasis resort town for tourists in the middle of some enormous sand dunes on Peru's southern coast. The hotels and restaurants are built around a small, smelly lagoon (but it looks pretty). The sand dunes surrounding the town go on and on as far as the eye can see towards the coast. We stayed at what my guidebook describes as a party hostal, though during the 2 nights we were there I can't say there was even a smidgen of a party going on... in fact, we were often the only ones up and about around the hostal and after dinner time the town shut down! Our first night we spent watching ''American Wedding'' at the hostal with the resident dalmation curled up on our laps, and the second night we retired to our rooms and read a bit before going to sleep early. Some crazy trip, eh?

Well, turns out it did get a little crazy... our sandboarding and dune buggy experience on our first afternoon ended up being one of the craziest and most fun things we've done on our entire trip. We were picked up at the hostal in an 8 seater dune buggy and as soon as we strapped in and put on our safety goggles (I looked like a mad scientist), our driver stomped down on the gas pedal and we were off racing through town and up and over the sand dunes. Pretty soon we were in a vast sea of sand dunes, stretching on as far as the eye could see. It was so beautiful. Our driver apparently wasn't as insane as the other ones, thankfully... though at the end of our tour we got a little taste of what crazy really was. After we raced around the dunes a bit, our driver stopped at the edge of (what we thought was) a gigantic, steep sand dune... and then told us we had to go down it on the sandboards face first on our stomachs. We thought he was joking, but no, he wasn't. Little did we know, each sand dune would be larger and steeper than the ones before it. We finally got up the guts to go down, and once we pushed off we suddenly realized it wasn't so bad... in fact, it needed to be faster! The first dune was about 100 or so feet long (a baby) and my favorite was probably about 200 feet long or more. But the last sand dune was a monster! It had to have been at least 4 football fields lengths long... and ridiculously steep. We all just stared at it in shock for a good 10 minutes before anyone had the guts to go down. One crazy daredevil in our group was a veteran sandboarder, so he just hopped on his board and FLEW down the dune like he was on a rocket. A few others followed, a couple even went down snowboard style (even more insane, in my opinion). Finally it was just Rachel and I and a few other girls left at top. After much debate, we decided to go down... at the pace of a snail. The dune seemed like it was at a 10 degree angle, though in reality it was probably less steep than we thought. We layed down on our boards and went down face first with our feet digging into the sand as hard as they could manage. At one point I almost got off my board and walked down the rest of the way... until I realized it was probably safer to stay on my board and inch along like a snail, than to possibly risk messing up and somehow tumbling down the hill. At one point I almost burst out laughing because I was thinking about how ridiculous Rachel and I probably looked to everyone else. After a few years time, we finally made it to the bottom.

At this point our shoes were weighed down with a ton of sand. Rachel took off a shoe and an entire beachful of sand fell out. Sand was in my hair, shirt, and pants, as well. We laughed, hopped back into our dune buggy and then had the craziest ride of our life back into town. This was when our sweet innocent driver decided to turn into an insane maniac. But a fun maniac At one point as we bounced about in the backseat and drove down a steep dune rollercoaster style (think Goliath, mom), Rachel yelled out to me between all her screaming that we'd normally have to sign a release form for something like this. I just screamed and laughed back in response. We had gone on the tour with 2 or 3 other buggies, and toward the end they started racing together... down a hill. At this point, I really did think they were insane. But it all ended well, and here I am typing this blog entry safe and sound with a great story to tell! Our driver was nice enough to stop at the top of the sanddune overlooking Huacachina for a photo op... once we finished snapping away, he raced down into town past scared onlookers on the dunes and screeched to a halt in front of our hostal. Whew!

Turns out our friend Matan from our Galapagos trip was also in Huacachina and had done the same sand dune tour... though unlike us he was brave enough to snowboard down all the dunes, and even broke his board in half on one of them. Makes him sound tough, doesn't it? Or perhaps kind of stupid, I'm not sure. We bumped into him earlier when we'd first got to town after lunch. I love randomly running into people in different countries. The really funny thing is that ever since Puno, we've been seeing this same French couple in every town we visited afterwards and in every bus terminal as well. And of course we had to see them walking around the lagoon in Huacachina.

On our last full day we decided to take a bodega (winery) tour in the nearby town of Ica. It was only about $10 for a private taxi driver to take us to the two wineries, pretty good price. The first winery was a bit disappointing... the tour was super quick, everything was really modern and all we saw was machinery, and the wines were kind of gross. The second winery was much more interesting, because it still uses the same traditional methods to harvest and produce its wines and pisco... including stomping on the grapes for the harvest each March (there is a whole festival for it!), and fermenting the grape juice in traditional clay (?) cannisters that they bury underground. We had our tour in Spanish and our guide complimented us on our comprehension and speaking skills... yay! We tried a dessert wine here, as well as pisco (the grape brandy that is Peru's national liquor), and a mixture of pisco/milk/figs that tastes somewhat like Bailey's (figs, coffee, same thing). Pisco is made by boiling the special grape juice, trapping the condensation which then swirls down a series of spiraled tubes into a bath of ice cold water, and then the condensation re-liquifies and there's the basic pisco. I really enjoyed all the old traditional methods they used for their wines and pisco.

That was pretty much the last of our trip in the Huacachina and Ica areas... next morning we woke up bright and early and caught a bus to Pisco, which would prove to be fairly uneventful, mostly due to the lingering effects of the August 2007 earthquake...