Huacachinna: The Extraordinary Oasis
Day 3
Woke up early morning at 6:30am to take a bus for 5 hours to reach Ica, a small village in Peru. We purchased the VIP premium seat on the tourist bus. The seats are on the lower deck and they were very comfortable. The security of this tourist bus was quite serious. The bus attendants video-tape your face before letting you hop on the bus.
Afterwards, we took a taxi from Ica to reach Huacachinna, an unexpected oasis located in the middle of a desert, and also home to many sand surfers.
Huacachina is pretty much of a mini-resort. Since it is a popular tourist destination, hostel rooms are always fully booked out. If you do find a room available, chances are it is expensive. Thankfully, we found a room but it was still $26 CDN per person for one night. In Peru, that is quite expensive.
As you can see below, there is a lake in the middle of a desert. I have never seen something like this before so it is quite thrilling to see such a scene. Later on, we signed up for a sand buggy tour to check out the never-ending desesrt.
We climbedup higher just to check out the entire view of Huacachina.
We bought tickets for a sand buggey tour of the dessert. It involves touring around the dessert as well as giving you an opportunity to try sand boarding - I will explain what that means in the next few pictures.
Now we are in the middle of nowhere.
Here is where the fun begins. We were told that we can "try sandboarding" in this tour. So we decided to grab a few sand boards and "sand-boarded" on a bunny hill. It turns out that we were not allowed to sand-board on a "bunny hill", but we were supposed to sand-board on the big steep hill right next to it. At first, we refused to do so for obvious reasons (keep in mind we never sand-boarded before). However, we realized later on that we were forced to go down the hill because the sand buggy was going to drive away and wait for us at the bottom.
Mind you folks, the hill was actually very steep. Nonetheless, we had no choice but to sand-board down.
Definitely a forced smile below.
See the dots below? Yea, that's right. Those are people! We were forced to go down this slope and hop on the car. See how high that was!
View of the top from below.
And we survived!
At night, we were treated by a bright moon shining above the Peruvian sky. This almost feels like an Arabian night.
