Whats the Story?

I´ll start off with a quick story that I forgot to tell in the last blog. It involves the night of the 4th of July, which for the largely US contingent of the burners was a big enough deal for them to travel to the next town to buy sketchy homemade fireworks for an extortionate price. We had a wee shin dig to watch the fireworks and generally wonder why everyone was feeling so patriotic. The british contingent meanwhile had hatched a nasty plot and, while the americans launched into their national anthem and got teary eyed watching the peruvian made explosions, down from the roof came a hail of english eggs, launched by men in red plastic coats. While chaos ensued below, one of the english guys, by the name of Gareth, got too caught up in the moment and stepped off the roof. The only thing that saved him from the 3m drop to concrete below was shoddy peruvian construction. His jeans caught on some exposed reinforcing steel sticking out of the wall. The rest of the night was full of rivalry between both parties, while the rest of us tried to keep out of the way.

Now on with the rest.....

The little town of Huacachina (Wakacheena) has become the get away destination for pisqueñan volunteers. When the piles of rubble in the street become too depressing, you´ve spent way too much money on chocolate from the little shop down the road and you´ll lose you´re sense of taste if you see another meal consisting solely of 3 different carbs, this is when the photogenic wee oasis in the middle of the desert starts to beckon. We were joined in Huacachina on the weekend by about 80% of the Pisco volunteers which meant we pretty much dominated the town for the whole weekend...

OK so here´s the formula that Huacachina, a town consisting almost entirely of hostels, restaurants, tour agencies and a lagoon, has worked out for itself: You roll into town for the weekend, stay at one of the many hostels, go for a rollercoasterish dune buggy ride through the dramatic desert dunes, go hurtling down said desert dunes on makeshift sandboards, and relax by the pool with a Pisco Sour in your hand. It´s not what I would call a genuine peruvian experience but it is a lot of fun.

The dune buggy ride took us speeding up out of the basin of the oasis, racing other buggies up the steep dunes and throwing us against our seatbelts on sharp turns. It was here that we came to appreciate the desert we were in which rolled with magnificence as far as the eye could see. After some more high speed hooning we parked abruptly facing downhill like a parallel park in Mount Vic. This was to be our first sandboarding slope. I´d like to give you a comparison with snowboarding s the boarders out there will know just what its like but I´ve never snowboarded so you´re out of luck! I quickly decided though that turning on the sand was going to be too slow and difficult so I developed my style of gunning it straight down as fast as possible. This worked pretty well for me to start with as I would normally crash out before I got too fast.

On our last day in Huacachina we hired sandboards and hiked up the steep towering dune that separates the town from neighbouring Ica. We warmed up on a gentle slope and admired the sweeping view before we commited to the task at hand. We had a pretty die hard sandboarding crew of about half a dozen, some of whom had even sandboarded prior to this weekend. Unfortunately on my second run down this slope I had gotten skilled enough to stay on my feet long enough to gather up some good speed. The next thing I know, I plough into the ground face first, bending my glasses, while my sandboard flies over and hits me in the head! Sweet crash and I came away unhurt and very slowly scooted my way to the bottom of the dune. I learnt a few days later that the most common sandboarding injury is a torn sphincter.... I count myself lucky.

The rest of the weekend was mostly spent at a place called the Bamboo Hut run by the culinarily gifted Beth. This was the favoured haunt of the burners as Beth made a great thai curry, a killer chocolate brownie, and let us drink BYO without charging us a thing. We had a huge night on Saturday culminating in a mission to a disco in nearby Ica, Tessa was seen busting pretty much every possible shape on the D-floor.

We said goodbye to most of the burners in Huacachina and continued on to Cuzco on a scenic but long bus ride with James (England), Stacy (US) and Jess (US), some of our fellow burners who were also jumping ship. We´re back to travelling and right in the heart of "tourist Peru"!