Perulog V: Staying Alive, in Huacachina

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The calming beauty of the Huacachina oasis was such a blatantly pleasant place to wake up that I grogged myself straight to the front desk and slapped down $3 for another night before stumbling my self-sabotaged mind, body, and spirit directly into the nearest hammock where I relaxed my eyes and pondered my Impressionistic memories of the previous evening’s antics.  In my slowly-awakening mind, ever-stumbling slurs and slanders descended into late-night social overtures of anti-gravitas that rose in direct parallel with my slippery slope of anti-memory and semi-consciousness.

None of which helped me get back to sleep.

In response, or possibly self-defence, I spent most of the day lying in that hammock trying my best to not do a damn thing.  And why not?  At ten soles per night these hotels charge prices similar to what you’d see on the backpack circuit in southeast Asia, but the accommodations are easily twice as nice.  This place was the closest I had ever come to a true resort stay, and with a loose itinerary and no travel partner to egg me on a day off was an easy call.

At some point during my lazing I made friends with a fellow Canadian, and when night approached Steve and I found a small bar nearby that was offering an all-night 2-for-1 happy hour of their already ridiculously inexpensive drinks.  It was here that I tried my first-ever pisco sour (and my second-ever, and my third-ever, and my fourth ever…), the local drink of choice.  And I do mean local; pisco is a distilled grape juice named for the town of Pisco which lie just a mere three kilometres east of our little bar.

By the time I switched to ordering pairs of piña coladas (and at ninety cents apiece I ordered a lot of pairs) I was slathering enough to start feeling self-indulgent and melancholy.  You see, this was the first anniversary of my most recent house fire, a harrowing experience that was recent enough that it was still inciting mental repercussions on an almost daily basis, and drunky me felt the need to mark the unfortunate anniversary by drinking a cheers my fellow fire victims Dave (who was the person who suggested “Peru” when I asked where I should go on this vacation) and his then-girlfriend Julia.  

But I couldn’t cheers this cheers alone.  Nay; such momentous trauma had to be shared.

Aside from Steve and I our little bar just happened to be occupied solely by women, which meant that Steve was otherwise occupied when I became overcome with the urge to spill my tale.  So I introduced myself to the unfortunate girl who was sitting on the barstool next to mine, ordered us each a pair of pisco sours and proceeded to unload upon her my traumatic tale of woe, a telling that took much longer and was nearly as distressing as the actual event itself.

(Which went like this: After a 3am nightcap with my downstairs neighbours we all fell hard into our respective beds.  Meanwhile, a wicker basket in their living room somehow started smouldering and eventually burst into a fire that engulfed their ground-level apartment in flames.  By a miracle of luck and desperation Dave – temporarily blinded by a flash explosion and with considerable burns to his face and arms – threw himself and Julia out a window before pounding on my door and trying in vain to kick it open.  However I heard the pounding and woke up on the top floor of my split-level apartment in a room filling with smoke.  I grabbed my cat and the guitar case that was closest to the stairs and ran out the door, only to see the cat dash back into the house.  As I ran back up to my apartment – which was now completely full of smoke, though only seconds had passed – to resave the cat I had no idea that the epicentre of the inferno happened to be directly underneath the staircase, and that had the stairs given way I – and the cat, who was clinging to me hard – would have fallen straight down into the basement and, well, I wouldn’t have been sitting in Huacachina toasting the unfortunate anniversary with a pair of pisco sours in front of me and two more piña coladas on the way.)

When my story was done and we’d cheersed away both our pisco sours I finally scared the poor girl off with my standard pickup move where I pretend I’m a midwife (don’t worry, it never works) Steve slid into her seat and started ordering us more drinks.  Which was just fine until it wasn’t.

Now, I can’t tell you if it was truth, drunken paranoia, or simply a surefire excuse for calling it a night, but my drunk and belligerent friend ultimately swore that he saw the bartender pour something untoward into our drinks, and he swore it loudly and accusatorially whilst staggering to his feet and knocking the stool noisily to the floor.  Luckily none of this led to the end of Steve, but it did rather hasten the end of our evening.

Ah, but doesn’t paradise always have its pitfalls?  Regardless, when the curtain fell on our night out on the oasis it was just a short zigzagging stagger to the relative safety and comfort of our high-end budget hotel.