Huacachina

Huacachina is just 4 km off Ica and we arrived here early in the morning after having spent the night travelling between Arequipa and Ica by bus. We found a room at one of the cheapest places “Casa de Arena” and the first thing we were interested in was food. We found a nice place close to the lagoon and enjoyed our breakfast, pancakes with fruits, scrambled eggs, fresh fruit juice and tea. Yummi!!!

Huacachina is a tiny, tiny resort village, dominated by a backdrop of giant sand dunes and nestled next to a small lagoon. Swimming in the lagoon is not recommendable (I don’t know if it is even allowed) but the sand dunes are an amazing thing to see and “explore”.

At the café/restaurant where we had breakfast we found out that they offer sand-boarding and dune-buggy tours so we booked ourselves a tour for the afternoon. We were six people on the tour, two guys from England, a couple from France and ourselves. For two hours we were supposed to put our lives in the hands of our buggy driver whose name we don’t know since he preferred not to speak to us. A part from his dullness of not wanting to speak with us, he turned out to be a really good dune buggy driver. We had a blast speeding up and down the dunes; it felt like being on a roller coaster. In between the speeding we stopped to try the sand-boarding. On purpose I wrote “try” since it didn’t really turn out to be an easy thing to do. I tried the first dune sand-boarding and did not really get a grip on it. The next dune I took sliding down with my belly on the board in stead of my feet. That was much easier and more fun. Fredrik as an advanced snowboarder had more success but he was struggling too. On one hand the boards really sucks (just normal plywood panels with some strips and wax) and on the other hand sand is not snow.

The whole tour was great fun though. At the end we stopped on the top of a dune to enjoy the sunset. Fantastic!!!!

Lots of love,

Sabrina and Fredrik