Surfing on Sand
Trip Start
Nov 13, 2005
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60
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Trip End
Jul 13, 2006
Ica, Peru
Saturday, May 6, 2006
Arriving 2 hours later, we found the best hotel (with cable tv of course) that has the hottest and most powerful showers in all of Latin America (South and Central). Absolute bliss I tell you. If it werent for the plastic bag over my leg that Ive been showering with for the past month, samson would have had to drag me out of the shower.
We leisurely caught a cab to hucachina, which is a palm fringed sulphur lake in the middle of the friggin desert. A true real life oasis. Quite fuunny really.
The desert is absolutely huge and is huge dune after dune of nothingness.
We signed up for a tour of the dunes, which basically is a dune buggy joy ride where the driver speed races up and down the dunes like a rollercoaster (I swear some of the drops are almost vertical and are at least 100m). In fact I think my guidebook advertises the trip as a rollercoaster trip through huge sanddunes - not for the feinthearted. My god did my heart skip a jump every time we raced up one dune, only to sail right down into nothing right after. And it all happens so fast and so frequently, theres NO time to think.
This dune buggy experience, also involved sandboarding down hundreds of metres of dunes. For me this sand boarding was sailing down with the board face forward since I couldnt sandboard to save my life. The first few cliffs were a short 100m no more at a angle that was about 30 degrees. A quick 10 seconds to the bottom. These were all fine and dandy for me since I could actually see the bottom and knew how long it would take. However our guide (our private guide- just the two of us) got excited and took sam to huge bloody cliffs atop the highest of sand dunes and egged him on to sail down almost vertical clifs that sailed for at least 150m. And of course a few seconds later sam was waxing his board ready to sail down the cliff. The dune was so high it took a whole 17 seconds for sam to reach the bottom at full speed. He got to a speed that was so fast even for him that he had to use his feet to break.
After a quick watch of the sunset over the dunes, our ride home was a wild race speeding up and down dunes. I was so scared I held my secure two shoulder seatbelt for dear life. (just in case it decided to somehow break). Sam just laughed at me cos he (alongside most) felt it to be absolutely thrilling. Despite the fun, this whole sandboarding/dunebuggy thing made me realise that that thrill feeling is fun when u are young.. but the older you get, the more you know, and the more you know what could happen (espcailly in peru), makes it a nailbiting experience and far from thrilling.
Im definetly getting too old for all of this...
