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011805
It was early when the alarm screamed me awake but no matter. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed or glazed over and disheveled, I was excited. As I sloggily skipped along the mostly-barren streets to meet the tour that would take me around the Ballestas Islands I was thinking of a weekend spent at a friend’s northern Ontario cottage several years before. I’d occupied a rainy afternoon by drawing up a comprehensive list of nearly two hundred things that I wanted to get done during my short time on this Earth. A “bucket list” as it were, though that drizzly day pre-dated the Rob Reiner movie by more than a decade, so I wouldn’t have known to call it that. Instead I titled it simply: Things To Do. Anyway, my list included some stuff that was basically impossible, like “play in a major league baseball game” or “visit every country in the world”, but it was mostly achievable things like “learn to speak Spanish”, “meet Edie Brickell”, and “own a convertible”. And one of the admirably high number of things I managed to check off of that long-lost life agenda before it became long-lost was “see penguins in the wild”. Which I was currently on my way to do, so with my pending checkmark in mind I strolled with more of a bounce in my step than you would expect from a guy who’d drunk as many solo room beers as I had drunk the night before.
A bus drove a group of us a half-hour south out of Pisco to Paracas, where we transferred to a medium-sized tourist boat. The trip to the island would take about an hour but not long after we departed I got my first taste of the remarkable sites I would soon be seeing in Nazca when the boat circled around an island and brought us face-to-face with a large and unmistakable pattern etched into the side of a sandy mountain.
Pottery found in and around the Paracas Candelabro dates back to about 200 BCE but the stones that enhance the sixty centimetre-deep trenches that outline the fantastic geoglyph date from some time later and were likely brought from elsewhere, so nobody is quite sure when the Candelabro was created, nor can many people agree on who built it or why, but one thing mostly everyone agrees on is that it sure does look like a candelabra. And that it’s a pretty damn cool thing.
Photos were clicked and off we went, for, as you might recall, this was not a Candelabro boat tour, this was a penguin boat tour! When we finally neared the Ballestas Islands the first creatures we encountered were a group of sea lions sunning themselves on the beach, but that zoological wonder was soon super-duperceded by the avian amazement of birds that dominated the islands. Oh the birds…they were everywhere!
Sure you got your cormorants (both red-legged and otherwise) and sure you got your blue-footed boobies, but of the nearly 7.3 gajillion birds fluttering around this island at least half of them were penguins. And each one of those adorable little waddlers was a cute little checkmark off my list. Oh, I was beyond excited, jittering like a three-year-old at xmas and holding my hands to my cheeks like a teeny-bopper at a Beatles concert. It was awesome!
The boat circled the group of islands several times and we saw all manner of wildlife, and really, it was quite simply a fantastic journey. Sure, it was no Galapagos (or so I’m told), but the excursion cost $8 instead of $1,000+ so I was happy to settle for now.
Back in Pisco I found myself a cold beer and some lunch and you would think that would make for quite a day. But not for this cowboy, dear friends. Not this day. And can you believe things got even better? To wit:
I checked out of my hotel and got a bus an hour-and-a-half inland to Ica, where I hired a three-wheeled taxi. The tiny cab took me up a road that had been carved into the side of a mountainous sand dune and around a distant corner and then, all at once I laid my eyes for the first time upon Huacachina, a real life, honest-to-goodness oasis. The town presents a simply incredible vista and it was one that I initially saw on the back of a fifty-sole bill. As a matter of fact, it was seeing the mirage-like oasis on the money that first caused me to inquire about Haucachina, and now here I was.
Fifty soles?!? The place looked like a million bucks.
Huacachina was nothing but a lagoon ringed with palm trees and pleasant hotels and restaurants, overshadowed on all sides by some of the tallest sand dunes in the world. Seeing Huacachina for the first time was absolutely breathtaking. I immediately found a great hotel with a pool and a thatched bar – the whole nine yards – for just $3 a night. I felt like I was at No Name Club Med. And not more than twenty minutes after checking in I found myself careening over those monstrous sand dunes in a dune buggy with a number of snowboards (curiously the locals referred to them as sandboards) strapped to the back.
Oh, just imagine the fun.
Actually, there’s no way you can imagine how fun this was. I don’t know if I can put it into words, but let’s see if this helps a little:
Two powerful dune buggies carrying a half-dozen touristos bombed through an endless desert of dunes for about three hours, catching 100% air as we hurtled over each peak and plummeting straight down the other side, only to immediately hurtle up towards the top of the next sandy tower. It made the scariest rollercoaster look like a kiddie park carousel. The fun level was through the roof, and that was just the getting there.
When we arrived at the top of a nice steep mountain our drivers cut their engines and their assistants would leap out and start to grease the bottom of the sandboards. For our first run we were all encouraged to try going down on our stomachs rather than standing up. I was still a season away from my first crack at snowboarding so I was happy to try it the easy way.
And I tell you, what a thrill!
Clutching the board to my chest, just the slightest nudge sent me reeling down the hill at breakneck speeds – almost literally I suppose for there was nary a helmet nor any whiff of safety equipment anywhere in sight – and I was screaming with uncontrollable, panicked laughter the whole way down.
At the next hill I decided to try it standing up. I knew nothing about bindings and the like but that was a moot point as the sandboards had none. Instead I balanced like one would on a skateboard, but the sand was so soft I couldn’t gain enough speed to keep the board properly skimming on top of the powder. After four dunes I had done two standing and two on my belly and it was clear that the real speed was achieved when laying down.
After the fourth run the guides were ready to take us back but I begged for one more dune. “You want a really big one?” my driver asked through mirrored sunglasses. I said I sure did and he yelled something in Spanish to the other driver. The other guy laughed and shrugged and put his machine in gear.
Well friends, they drove us to a dune that was easily eight hundred feet high, likely more, and I swear it sloped down at about a seventy, maybe a seventy-five degree angle. I stood at the top with my freshly greased board and I don’t mind telling you I was having second thoughts. But the theme of the year that had brought me to South America in the first place was Coming Alive in 2005, and if that theme meant anything it meant that I should needlessly and without question risk life and limb at every opportunity, especially if it meant sliding down one of the highest sand mountains in Peru on a plexiglass board smeared with Vaseline just a mere eighteen days into the new calendar.
Right?
So I laid myself flat on the board and shoved off. In an instant the world became a blur. I know I hit eighty kilometres an hour going down that monster, I just know it. I was certainly going too fast to safely dig my toes into the sand to steer, as I’d done on the other hills. Luckily I didn’t need it, and when the hill levelled off enough for me to stop safely I jumped to my feet with a feeling of miraculous, ecstatic victory.
The next guy that came down didn’t fare quite as well. He was also riding on his stomach, and when he hit a bump in the sand the front tip of the board came up and smacked him sharply on the forehead, just above his right eye. I was next to him just seconds after he reached the bottom and already he had a cartoonish goose egg growing out of his head the likes of which I’ve not seen before or after. It was nauseating to look at.
“Dear lord,” I cried, averting my eyes in horror. “We have to get you to a hospital!”
“Oi,” he laughed, reaching up and gently feeling his Flintstonian lump. “Nah,” he said casually, “Awl be ‘a’right!” Soon his friends were beside us, taking the piss out of him and agreeing to a man that I was definitely overreacting, insisting that their buddy got worse lumps on a good night at the local pub. I quite expected the kid’s head to explode but who was I to argue with a bunch of feisty Irishmen? Ah well, it was his noggin and not mine, and that mishap notwithstanding the whole afternoon ransacking through the desert remains one of the single most fun experiences of my life.
And it didn’t hurt that the last dune our buggies crested presented me with a panoramic view of that most wonderful sight, the gloriously picturesque Huacachina oasis.
My hotel hosted a barbecue social that evening, all you could eat and all you could drink for $5. If there was indeed a strike amongst the Peruvian beef industry it didn’t stop the chef from tossing burger after burger onto the grill. In the end I gave the rest of the crowd a run for their money, managing five delicious hamburguesas and countless rum and cokes before undergraduating to muchas cervesas and barely not dodging a handful of Marley-sized giggle sticks that started going around like hot potatoes in a lava lamp.
I don’t remember going to sleep but I woke up, so I must have.
Todd Man Out 