After leaving one incredibly hard to spell town it was a relief to arrive in Ica! Our time in an easy to pronounce town was short as we jumped in a mototaxi to Huacachina approximately five minutes after arriving. We were bound for a natural oasis in the middle of the desert. It really is just like the kind of oasis you see in the movies. Water, surrounded by some palm trees, (add a couple of buildings in this case) surrounded by sand dunes. We were asked by one girl during our stay in the small town around the Oasis, "Is this man made?" she was American... need I say more.

We had arrived for one thing and that was to go sandboarding. So we booked into a nice hostal with a swimming pool and took up their offer of organising our sandboarding for the next day. After taking a short walk to the oasis we discovered that we could hire snowboards with boots and bindings for the entire day and still go out on the dune buggy for a small amount extra so we cancelled our original expediton and got an early night ready for a full days sandboarding the following morning.

We awoke early and took to the dunes to avoid the midday sun and with a belly full of pancakes and fruit we were confident that we would get a good few hours of boarding in. We were sadly wrong. Walking up a sand dune is way harder than it looks. Especialy when you are wearing snowboard boots and two pairs of socks. We tried bare feet on the dunes but the sand was about the same temperature as the centre of the sun! When we finally got to the top of the dunes we got our very technical "candle" out of our pockets and waxed the bottom of the snowboards. We had been told that the steeper the dune and the more wax you put on the faster you will go. We pointed our boards down the dune and got off to what can be best described as a slow crawl towards the bottom. By the time we had reached the bottom we were turning an interesting red colour and decided to hit the pool for a well deserved dip! Once the sun had gone behind the dunes about five hours later we went back out again to get more practice. Slightly faster this time with new candles it was just like snowboarding in slow motion.

Heading out over the dunes in a sand buggy the following morning we were well straped in and since the thing included a roll cage we kind of knew what to expect, however...It absolutely flew across the sand, up and down impossibly steep dunes with the driver finding the squeals emanating from the back (mostly Katies) most amusing. We stopped in several strategic positions i.e on the edge of immense drops to get out, prepare the boards and hurtle over the edge. It was fun as Paul was really getting the hang of it by this point in the day and Katie made some spectacular somersaults, managing to emerge with what Paul lovingly described as "a beard of sand"!

On route back to the oasis we stopped to be introduced to Patrick. This man lives on the dunes, travels by foot and voluntarily cleans the desert by picking up all the plastic etc. that gets blown across from surrounding settlements. We gave him a small donation towards his sterling work and after stopping for the standard sunset photo, headed back. That evening we boarded a bus for Cusco, still removing sand from various crevices...