Sur America: Huacachina: The Oasis

From Lima we took a 5 hour bus ride down the coast and ended up in a dusty, hot town called Ica. A short five minute tuktuk ride brought us to a neat little Oasis nestled in the middle of giant sand dunes, the backpacker trap called Huacachina.

There are many restaurants, shops and hostels that surround the oasis and all are overpriced just for the gringo backpacker. The oasis itself is quite dirty looking, but lots of people still swim in it. I dipped my foot in and didn´t notice a difference between the afternoon air temperature and the murky water, so decided against jumping in.

We arrived too late in the day to book a dune buggy and sand boarding tour, so Jon and I celebrated the halfway point in our trip by eating out at one of the gringo restaurants and stuffed ourselves with some nachos and brownies at Desert Nights. Very healthy. The next morning we definitely hiked back in to Ica to shop at the supermarket so that we could provide our own meals from then on in Huacachina. Our hostel didn´t have a kitchen, but no matter, we just whipped out our stove and leftover gas from the Santa Cruz trek and cooked up oatmeal, soups and pastas in our room, taking care to always keep a window open while cooking and block the view of the burning stove from the hostel workers as they swept down the halls.

The first of the two big things we wanted to in Huacachina was the combined dune buggy and sand-boarding tour. We took off from our hostel at 4pm to avoid the heat of the day, loaded up in a 10 person dune buggy and cruised around on the dunes. Our driver was a bit slow and not as crazy as the other drivers, which annoyed Jon and I, as other buggies flew past us. Finally, one girl said ´mas rapido´ and he kicked it into gear for a bit. Over the course of a couple hours, the dune buggy would drive us around and then drop us off at the top of big sand dunes and we would each get a sand board to go down the hill on. We tried different styles, like sledding on our bellies and strapping in like a snowboarder. Both were fun, but what really made the difference was the board. Most of them were pretty shitty and beat up on the bottom and consequently stuck to sand. We were each given a chunk of a candle to use to wax the bottom of our boards between runs, but that didnt really help. Still, we had a fun time and especially enjoyed being out on the dunes as the sun set. Later that night, Jon and I bought a beer and hiked up to the top of the highest dune behind our hostel in the moonlight. From the top, we could see all of Ica and down into Huacachina. It was very peaceful up top and reminded Jon and I of evening hikes up Badger Mountain back in Richland. Running back down the steep dune was probably the best part.

The next day we had signed up for a pisco tour around Ica. Jon and I jumped into a dumpy car with our private driver and made our first stop at Bodega Vista Alegre. To get to the Bodega, we drove through some pretty slummy parts of town and arrived at a massive cement wall with big wooden doors. They opened and inside stretched a tree-lined road surrounded by dusty vineyards leading up to a big, tidy building. Jon and I got to try their white wine, red wine (a Malbec Cab-Sauv), dessert wine and pisco before getting a tour of the facilities and information on the wine and pisco making process. For those of you who don´t know what pisco is, it is a clear liquor that tastes similar to vodka and is made from fermented and distilled grape juice. However, while there are about 300 different varietals of grapes in Peru, only 8 of them can be used to make pisco. The volume of grape juice needed to the amount of pisco produced is about 4 to 1. Pisco is used in the famous Peruvian cocktail drink Pisco Sours, which consist of pisco, sugar, lime juice, egg white and cinnamon.

Our next stop was a more pisco-oriented facility. We had a private guide named Victor who seemed to have already had a bit of pisco that day. He was a riot and taught Jon and I a lot about the big pisco festival in Ica the beginning of March. Their grape harvesting time down here is in March, so this festival was all about the grape crushing. Young, pretty girls compete to be a queen for the festival and stomp on the grapes with their barefeet. There is also a lot of drinking. The pisco distilling process at this place was less sophistocated than the previous one, and actually used the same clay pots that the Inca people used to make pisco. Victor said that it was the Incans that first made pisco, and the name pisco is a bastardized version of Quechua name for the drink. We drank some shots of pisco with Victor after our tour, who seemed happy to pour us as much pisco as we liked, and when I asked him to join us, he was quick to grab himself a shot glass. Surprisingly we didn´t buy any pisco on our tour, but we did buy some special made pecan-caramel chocolates, since the pecans themselves came from the trees we had walked under on our tour. We also bought some lucuma marmalade. Lucuma is an orange fruit, indiginous to Peru and Chile, and had a taste similar to sweet potatoes, not too sweet, but good flavor.

Those two excursions wrapped up our must-dos in Huacachina, so we were on the next twelve hour night bus out of Ica on to Arequipa for some trekking in the Colca Canyon!