Day 14-15: Huacachina, Peru

From Lima Jorge, Isabelle, Allison, and I all rode down on a very nice bus to Huacachina. Huacachina is an oasis in the middle of the desert. Our Hostel was very nice. The pool was clean as were the rooms and the showers were hot! We met another girl who was staying in our room, Crystal- she is from Canada and is doing volunteer work in Brazil. She was killing time in Huacachina while she waited for her visa.

Sunday morning we all woke up and ate our breakfast pool side. (We try and find hostels in which breakfast is included. In Peru, breakfast normally consists of some sort of bread, butter, jelly, coffee, and juice.) There were two very loud parrots that were in the palm trees next to our table that kept saying ¨¡Hola!¨ Later that morning we had a brilliant idea to hike up one of the sand dunes behind our hostel just to get a good look at the dessert and our oasis. It was really hard to treck up just sand and our calves burning as we all tried to hold our sandals on our feet because the sand was so hot. The view from the top was great and well worth it though. Our little trek made us really appreciate the buggy ride we would have later.

The reason most tourists stop by Huacachina is for sandboarding. Our trip left out at 4pm. We all climbed in our 10 man sandbuggy and took off into the desert. Our first driver was having a little too much fun because he blew out the suspension and he had to call us in another buggy. We had such a blast being thrown around the desert, going straight up one mountain side to come down almost vertically on the other. They stopped at the top of 4 or 5 large drops to let us go down on our boards. They were supposed to resemble snowboards but they were pretty much plywood and plastic. It worked though! They waxed up our boards and after trying to go down on my feet the first time, which was pretty slow moving, everybody decided to go down on their belly and it was much faster and more fun. Of course we got sand everywhere! It was in our face, up our nose, down our shirt, in our pockets and shoes. Totally worth it though. There was even an older couple who took the trip and the man was almost always the first to take the hill. It was great! After two hours they drove us to see a spectacular view of the sunset. The ride back was just as fun as the ride there. The drivers probably love their jobs, driving crazy in a desert dunebuggy all day. It was a lot of fun.