After the most horrendous night bus ride in over a year, we arrived in Ica at 6am. We caught a cab to Huacachina, a small oasis on the edge of the enormous sand dunes just outside of town. Huacachina seemed like the exact opposite of our bus ride; it was quiet, uncrowded, cool (in the morning), and a nice man welcomed us at the hotel. We actually got really lucky, as we found a nice room at the first hotel we looked at. A nice airy room with two walls of windows looking out at the dunes. After sleeping away our first few hours in Huacachina, we walked around the village which is not much more than a single road circling the small pond (Laguna Huacachina).

Since there’s not too much food (or anything for that matter) in Huacachina, we made a quick trip to the supermarket in Ica to stock up. We ate PB&Js by our hotel’s pool, swam a bit, and then slept more of the day away. I think we were all so tired because we had the trek, followed by a bunch of travel days, and capped off with a night bus last night.

Undoubtedly the highlight of today was taking a dune-buggy up into the sand dunes for some crazy driving and sandboarding. Joylani was feeling sick, so it was just a driver, Alex, and I. The vehicle was simple, just an engine mounted on a frame of metal pipes. Soon after hopping in, we were zooming out into the sandy wilderness. Our driver accelerated hard out into the desert and up the dunes. For the first 15 minutes or so, we just drove around the dunes, which was truly awesome. The exciting experience matched our guidebook’s description of the ride: like a roller coaster without tracks. We went straight up dunes I wouldn’t have imagined were scalable, bottomed out on the top ridges of some dunes, and came down on super steep slopes. Many times we’d go up a steep face only to turn and come down again. Our driver seemed to like pushing the limits and I’d say we spent a good amount of time beyond the 45-degree position. I would’ve been more worried, but our buggy had roll-bars in addition to a seemingly-low center of gravity. After our initial joy ride, we spent the rest of our hour driving to the tops of dunes and sandboarding down.

The sandboards were basically homemade snowboards made of plywood and nylon foot straps. Due to the considerable friction of the sand, we had to wax the boards for each run. We started off standing and riding down snowboard style, but after a few runs we decided to take more risk. We took the last few dunes laying down head-first. In addition to the dunes being bigger and steeper, laying down was a much scarier position. But it was also much more thrilling and we finished out our hour speeding face-first down dunes several-stories tall.