C & C globetrotting around the world…

The bus from Lima to Ica only took 4 and a half hours through mainly desert landscape. From Ica, we took a taxi to Huacachina, 5 minutes away. Huacachina, a small village, is built around a small natural blue-green laguna in the desert and is often called the “oasis of America”. The oasis actually features on the back of the 50 Nuevo Sol note. Legend holds that the lagoon was created when a beautiful native princess was apprehended at her bath by a young hunter. She fled, leaving the pool of water she had been bathing in to become the lagoon. The folds of her mantle, streaming behind her as she ran, became the surrounding sand dunes. In the last few years it has become an attraction for tourists drawn by sandboarding and taking dune buggy rides on the sand dunes that stretch several hundred meters high. We were told that the sandbuggy tours started about 10 years ago when a French tourist made the suggestion. Since then, the buggies have been hand made and reach a speed of 90km/h. In total, there are about 50 of them in Huacachina.

After checking in at our hostel (Desert Nights) we had a late lunch next door. Then it was time for our two hour sand dune tour. We took a sand buggy that drove us around. It really felt like being in a rollercoaster and Cecilia loved it, but Christoph was clinging on tight. We stopped at a point where we got a beautiful view of the surrounding dunes, counting some of the highest in the world, and got to try sandboarding. Some people strapped their feet to the board, but we sat down and used it like a sled, controlling the speed and direction with our hands. This was a practice run, as afterwards we went to bigger dunes. The board is a lot harder to control on sand than snow, so here the guide told us to lie down on our stomach. He sent us straight down head-first and we could brake with our feet, if we wanted. It was a bit scary, but exhilarating too. Luckily we had our bafanas, otherwise we would have swallowed a lot of sand. At the bottom, the guide picked us up and we drove again with the sand buggy to the next huge dune where we repeated the sandboarding experiment. Sanboarding is a quick sport, reaching up to 70km/h, depending on the board, weight of the person and if you don’t brake. It was great. At the end, we watched the sun set over the dunes before it got pretty chilly. On the tour we met some people, so we had dinner and spent the evening together, which was lots of fun.

The next day we went on another tour after watching the soccer game. The region around Ica, close to the town of Pisco, is known for wineries and bodegas. Here they make sweet red wine and pisco, so we went to 2 of these to sample some wine and pisco. The first one we visited was “El Catador”, a family-owned winery and bodega since 1856. We got a tour of the place and saw how they make everything, but unfortunately it’s not wine season now so everything was empty. Pisco, the typical hard liquor of Peru is also made of grapes. He showed us the basin where the grapes get smashed before the juice is separated from the grape skins. Then the juice is let to ferment for 3 days before it’s filled into pisco jars made of terracotta. These are lined up and let to ferment for about 1 year before being distilled. It is then filled into a huge plastic barril and left for 2 years. Only then can it be filled into bottles. We tried some red wine, which tasted more like port than wine, but not really good. We also tried pisco with honey, pure pisco and pisco cream. Then we went to the other winery and bodega, called Lazo, dating from 1809. Here we were not shown around, but got to taste many different kinds. The guy was very funny and his products were good. We had 2 kinds of wine and 2 kinds of pisco. We also tried 2 pisco creams, which were delicious.