Crazy flight over nazca lines and sandboarding
Trip Start
Apr 14, 2004
1
23
25
Trip End
Jul 27, 2004
Arequipa, nazca, and ica,
Peru
Monday, September 6, 2004
after meeting up for dinner with denise and her friend (whose name i cant remember, and since u know none of these people i guess it doesnt matter much to you,but they were the swiss girls i had met on the tour), we met up with the tour guide we had also met earlier and spent the evening at the same bars i had been at the night prior to departing for the tour for a repeat performance...once again, it was a late one, and i may have been a little under the weather the following morning...when i did venture outside it was necessary to dump my photos onto cd, and in that process i met an american english teacher, whom i ended up making a sweet ass lunch with...from the local market we purchased avocados, and other treats, for what would be an amazing guacamole with banana chips...this however would make me late for my lunch date with the girls, and i figured for sure they would ditch me...as luck would have it, they waited me out, and after watching them eat lunch due to already eating lunch without them, we went to the mall to watch shrek 2 (the movie) in spanish...i didnt quite understand all of the jokes, but what i did sure was funny...cant wait to see it in english and actually understand it all...
that evening the three of us boarded the night bus for nazca, and arrived early in the morning...the girls had a prebooked hotel, so we said our goodbyes, and i joined another traveller from the bus to book a flight over the mysterious nazca lines...they are a bunch of lines in the shapes of animals, astronauts, and what would seem to be guidelines for a landing strip for alien space ships???we found a 9 am flight, and while waiting (it was like 6 am) we slept on the hostel/tour agency's couches...this was not a pleasant wait for me, as i was quite ill, and various trips to the toilet didnt allow me much sleep...the prospect of going up in a small aircraft known for its crazy ride at a low altitude was making me reconsider doing it in my present state...as 9 came and went, we were fed a bullshit story about it being to foggy in the morning for the flight, and that we wouldnt be able to go till the afternoon...being near the end of my trip and thus short on time, i wanted to leave town that evening for the next stop...so i decided that that would not do, and believing that the agency was full of shit, and had just likely overbooked the flight, we left and found another agency who managed to rush us on to the next flight leaving in 45 minutes...
the flight was cool (and clear, the other agency was lying)...i think i enjoyed the flight just as much or more than viewing the actual lines...the 6 passenger cessna would tilt one way to let one side of the plane view them, and then bank hard in the other direction for the other passengers...after safely landing, and spending some time in what turned out to be the same hotel as the swiss girls i had previously left, i decided i was not feeling well enuff to board another bus so soon...so i decided to splurge big time, and check myself into the 3 star hotel, and spent the day pampering myself with a clean, hot shower (i even showered in bare feet) and used more towels than i had seen to date on my entire trip...soap and shampoo, covered glasses, as well as other hotel treats were quite the luxury...also, being that i was spending much time in the bathroom, it was nice to be able to sit down on the seat and have a ready supply of toilet paper!!!ah, its the samll things that please u at that point...most of that afternoon we spent suntanning poolside, and i felt like i was at a resort...
the following morning the girls went their way and i continued onto the desert oasis town of huacachina...it was exactly as it sounds, a pool of water surrounded by houses and unending sanddunes about 10 minutes outside the city of ica...i checked into a wikked hostel that had a poolside bar and lots of common area to meet the many other backpackers that were there...the main attraction to this place is sandbuggy tours thru the dunes and sandboarding down them...the first evening, my roomate and i climbed the huge dune behind the hostel to take in the beautiful sunset and share a celebratory puff...we carried up sandboards, or what they consider to be sandboards...they are basically rectangles cut out of plywood, curved a bit at the tip, and you strap your feet in with velcro....i think i could do a better job in shop class at about the age of 9...but whatever, i guess it worked(kinda)...sunset was about an hour away yet, so i figured i would do a run and hike back up the dune in time for sunset...my buddy didnt feel like doing that hike twice so he waited for me at the top...
feeling a little cocky due to knowing how to snowboard and wakeboard, etc. i waxed up the board with floor wax, and didnt wipe it off so that i could get even more speed...i had previously talked to a few others who said that you cant really turn on them, you just hafta point it straight down and go...so i did...man did i fly, but i got going so fast that i got a little scared, and decided to do what felt naturally...make a turn for the speed check, just like you would do in snowboarding...wrong idea...the thick edges of the board catch in the sand, and the next thing i know i am cartwheeling down the dune at about mach-1...i didnt get hurt so i just kept on going with a little more care this time...(they really need some proper boards to make it more fun)...after reaching the bottom i started the climb back up to the top, and instead of walking to the lesser inclined dune and walking the ridge, i decided it would be quicker to just walk straight back up...yah right, for every two steps up, i think i slid back down about a step and a half...talk about tiring work...i was way late for the sunset, and a couple of times i had convinced myself i wasnt even gonna bother getting bak up to the top...but i perservered and eventually made it...we strapped in and rode back down...
the next morning i jumped on one of the 10 passenger dune buggies after exhausting all possibilities at trying to locate one that i could drive, and we went for a tour into the dunes...these things were definitely not constructed to north american safety standards, or with much safety in mind at all...basically they are a death trap just waiting to happen some day...they look nice and have roll bars and safety harnesses, but your head could smack off the bars at any moment, and the harnesses slip off if you arent careful...one rollover or "end for ender" over a lip of a dune, and there will be 10 dead gringoes...the good thing about them though was that they drop you off near the tops of the dunes so you can ride them down on your board...so picture about 35 gringos strapped into boards, falling and tumbling all over these dunes with absolutely no clue as to what they are doing...actually a few guys werent that bad, but without stroking my own ego too much, it was a good feeling to be the king of the dunes for the day...
i spent the evening in the nearby city to purchase some local booze (pisco) and chocolates to bring home...that night was a huge bbq feast and piss-up, with all the fellow travellers, and i met up with a few guys that i had met previously in arequipa...you can fill in the story for the rest of the evening...
