Our friends Brendan and Laura flew down to hang out with us for our last week in Peru. We all met up in Huacachina, a little oasis town just outside of Ica on Peru’s coast. After settling into our hostal by sitting next to the pool and eating lunch in Ica to get caught up, we booked a dune buggy ride. A little before sunset the whole town fills with tourists and dune buggies to go up into the dunes and sandboard.
I thought the dune buggies would be small and fit maybe four, maybe five, people, but these things were monsters for large groups. I didn’t have sunglasses which was a mistake mostly because sand sprays everywhere including into your eyes. Just riding in the buggies was pretty fun since they went fast and drove over the edge of big dunes making it feel a little like a roller coaster. It could be a little uncomfortably bumpy at times, so you had to hold on to keep from banging body parts on stuff.
We stopped 4 or 5 times at dunes and got the sandboards out of the back to slide down the hills. The sand is much harder to turn in than snow, so I found you could go faster and get a much more stable ride if you just went down on your belly on the board. Turns out face first is a lot better, otherwise you get way to much sand sprayed in your face. I usually got down the hill a lot faster than everyone else, so I’d run back up for another go. It took some guts on the bigger ones not to slow down since I got going really fast. The scenery was also very pretty, and we got to see the sun set over the dunes. When we got back to the hostal we had to get sand out of every part of our bodies.
The next day we took a wine tour and went to some chocolate stores and a few wineries. Actually, most of the places made pisco, which is like a distilled wine. It’s made from grapes and distilled into 44% alcohol. The Peruvian wine is almost all very sweet, so we didn’t really care much for the wine. The pisco tastes better, at least when it’s mixed as it’s really strong straight. We went to one modern winery that uses machinery, but the cooler one was the old fashioned one where they still stomp the grapes. We just missed the grape stomping festival by a week or so, but it was still really cool to see. There were also copious samples, and by the end of the tour we could barely drink anymore, especially since we hadn’t eaten lunch. After the tours we had lunch before heading north to Paracas.