Day 227, 228,229 - Huacachina, Peru- Wednesday 30th, Thursday 31st May, Friday 1st June 2012

After only four and a half hours on the lovely Cruz Del Sol bus we arrived in Ica. On the bus Soph had got chatting to a French man and after talking to him for over an hour he asked if we were Dutch!? This is the third person to ask us if we're from Holland - we can understand how we might not look English but you'd think that he would have picked up on Soph's London accent?!! Once we got our backpacks off the bus we grabbed a cab for a fifteen minute journey to the beautiful Huacachina. The little town is gorgeous; it's really small and friendly with about four hostels, half a dozen little restaurants and some small bars that all surround a picture perfect lagoon that is right in the middle of it all. The place is quite literally in the middle of the Peruvian dessert and is shadowed by huge sand dunes that surround the lagoon. The cab dropped us off at a hostel and managed to haggle us a discount providing we did a sand boarding trip with them - not a problem for us as we had heard that the town was famous for it!! We checked into the hostel which (again) is like a little farm, it had a very fluffy St Bernard puppy, two white rabbits, two tortoises, a guinea pig (cuy) and a couple of old dogs - and that's just the women!! In Peru we have found that you can't go to a bar, café or restaurant without someone offering you a Pisco sour; apparently this is the number one cocktail in Peru. Thus far we had managed not to have one so we thought it was about time that we tried it - especially as the region we were in was famous for producing the best Pisco. We unpacked and headed down to the lagoon for drinks and to watch the sunset over the dunes - six Pisco sours and six Cuba libre's later (what?! It was happy hour!) and we were a little drunk! We drunkenly headed back to the hostel as we had booked onto their BBQ night -brilliant! We had steak, sausage and chips with salad and another three cocktails each and we spent the night chatting to an American couple and two really nice guys from Amsterdam - we planned to sand board with them the next day. After our nine cocktails I could see that the Pisco sours had hit Soph (and me!!) so we headed off to bed.

We woke this morning massively excited because today was 'sand boarding day!!' We grabbed some breakfast and then chilled most of the day by the pool or played with the little St Bernard puppy and tortoises, we even had a game of table football, using a lime as the ball - I won of course! At the moment I'm reading a book called "The Bang Bang club" which is about a group of photographers in South Africa during appartide - it's really interesting but pretty graphic so playing with the puppy was a welcome relief. Soph is one her millionth book and is now reading the Marigold Hotel - we couldn't have picked more different books! Before we knew it 3:45pm had come around and it was time to board our crazy 4x4 buggy; which is basically like a long mini bus with no roof and roll bars instead. The ride up and down the sand dunes was awesome and it took about twenty minutes to get to the dunes that we were going to ride. Soph sat at the back with some people we had met the night before and I got to ride upfront with the local lunatic who drove the buggy. The smell of diesel was overpowering and the sand actually hurts your face because you're going so fast, neither of us wore sunglasses either so by the time we were there we had eyes full of sand! We started off on the small dune which was about twenty metres high. So we all grabbed our boards off the back of the buggy, strapped them to our feet and threw ourselves down the dune - oh and yes we both fell over! Oh and yes, it bloody hurts! Once at the bottom of the dune we walked over to the next one which was twice the size, most of the girls decided to lay on their stomachs and go down that way - Soph joined them. The problem was that you actually went faster because of the lower centre of gravity - so Soph (who was slightly nervous of breaking something - especially as we had our five day trek coming up) ended up shooting down the dune like a bullet!! I was next and managed to stand the whole way down and actually steer the board, I was well chuffed and really enjoyed it - so much so that I ran back up the dunes and did it again. Next was the biggest dune, it must be eighty metres high and at a forty five degree angle. We both went down on our stomachs - in fact the whole group did as you go so fast, and we were all a little bit nervous about standing. Then we tackled another three dunes just as big; luckily I stood all three times and was starting to show off and be a big head, Soph on the other hand had found a way to go down the dunes really lady like - on her bum!!! After all the dunes we realised it was 7pm so we then watched the sunset over the dunes before heading back to the hostel and dinner. Wicked day, it was so much fun and maybe some snowboarding in Chile could now be on our itinerary.............

Friday was a lazy day waiting for our overnight bus that would take us to Cusco. So we basically spent the day eating food, lying in the hammocks reading our books and playing with the various animals in our hostel. Come 6pm we got our taxi to Ica and picked up our bus. We were in for a sixteen hour journey so had paid more for the best seats - wow, they were amazing!!! It was like first class of a plane - we even got dinner and a bingo game (of which we understood hardly any as it was all in Spanish!). After watching a couple of films we got our head down for some zzzzz's ready for our morning arrival in Cusco.