Day 74 - Huacachina and the perils of dune buggying.

Depart Nazca in the morning, though not before calling Leo and inviting him to lunch in Lima, since he’s going to go there in week or so to pick up a group of New Zealand students. Oh dear, this has all the markings of a bona fide crush: I can't stop thinking about him.

Take a wretched, ancient Soyuz bus to Ica. For the duration the two-hour journey I am subjected to a loud Nicolas Cage movie where he turns into something undead with a flaming skull. Smooth transition from bus terminal to the village of Huacachina; I catch a taxi straight from the bus terminal and Lucho the taxi driver feeds me biscuits.

Huacachina used to be a posh resort area based around a picturesque lagoon amidst giant sand dunes; in fact, you can still see it on the 50 sol notes. Now there’s nothing posh about it - it’s a magnet for adrenalin-mad backpackers who flock here in droves to go sandboarding and to ride the dune buggies. In fact, every second vehicle in the village is a dune buggy. When I first heard ‘dune buggy’, I imagined something like a golf course buggy, chugging sedately up and down the dunes, but it turned out to be something quite different.

A metal contraption with large wheels roars around the corner and skids to a stop by the tour agency. Think large open-plan car with a reinforced steel frame and heavily padded seats with harnesses, like the kind you’re strapped into on a roller coaster. There are eight of us; I’m in the second row and the thing takes off at great speed and roars up the nearest dune. We’re bouncing all over the place, especially the British girls in the back who keep swearing; didn’t realise what exactly they were signing up for. It really is like a roller coaster ride; the buggy rushes up to the dune’s crest, only to drop straight over the edge, taking our stomachs with it. Cue lots of screaming and hysterical laughter. The sand’s in our hair and in our eyes as the buggy rushes along at great speed, up and down the dunes, screeching around corners, sometimes barely balancing at a forty-five degree angle, plunging down near-vertical slopes again, setting off another chorus of screams. I love it, and cackle gleefully to myself, imagining my friends back home stuck in their office jobs. This is my office.

At the top of a particularly large sand dune, the sand boards come out. Our belligerent, unsmiling driver waxes them and shows us that we can go down on our stomachs if we’re not great on our feet. I’ve done sandboarding before in San Pedro, in the Atacama Desert, and recall falling over a lot, so I try the other way. Hurtling down a steep sand dune, head first, doesn’t seem terribly sensible, but then again, neither am I. An exhilarating alternative. I try standing on my feet when coming down the second dune, fall over, spit the sand out of my mouth and screech: “Puta madre, me caí!”, just like I’ve been taught by my San Pedro instructor. It means: “Bugger, I’ve fallen down!”

One of the British girls is particularly fearless and she’s the first one down every dune, even though she’s never done it before. Other groups join us and soon the dune side is crowded with skidding, rolling, sliding bodies. Sand clouds are everywhere.

We roar off to another dune, and another, even steeper and bigger one. Afterwards, a bunch of sand-covered creatures piles back into the buggy, the sand stuck to our sun cream, inside our clothes, in places where you wouldn’t imagine sand could get into. The sun sinks behind the dunes as our driver runs us up and down some more dunes at a reckless speed, rattling our bones and scaring the heck out of us. Dune buggy rides are not for the faint-hearted.

Hostal Salvatierra, where I’m staying, is a basic place with a warren of huge, basic rooms, a swimming pool and a patio dotted with listless dogs. Huacachina has a great many hostels for a tiny place and seems to exist solely for tourism.

Over a hamburger dinner at Desert Nights, I am hailed by a vaguely familiar-looking guy with a beard. Then I remember: he’s the British guy who climbed Huayna Picchu ahead of me, draped in the England flag on the day of the first World Cup match. Geoff invites me to join him and a motley crew of backpackers, and I end up having a lively dinner with Ruud the Israeli guy, Ed from Cambridge and a girl who thinks that my being a travel writer is the coolest thing ever. We swap travel tips and I ask Ruud why Israelis seem to always travel in groups. He says it’s because they tend to travel with a friend or two and then meet up and join up with other Israelis. He doesn’t like travelling in groups, and feels that many Israelis miss out on things they want to do, because they won’t do them alone, and if the group doesn’t do it, no one does. I agree that group travel can be a challenge; I also prefer to travel either alone or with just a single friend; there are fewer decisions to be made that way.

Geoff and Ed do card tricks. I go off to do my writing. Itchy feet. Moving on again in the morning.