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Arriving at the Ica bus depot after a thirty-hour marathon that began with surreal magnificence before segueing into prolonged discomfort on a Medieval level, I stumbled into a nearby internet cafe dizzy and giddy with fatigue and freedom and in this altered state I struggled to type out memories of the unforgettable five days I’d just lived.
So pardon me if the writing has felt a little forced. Can you taste the hunger, sense the fatigue, feel the relief that was gushing through my bent and shuttered capillaries? I sure hope not.
After I quit the internet cafe I changed the last of my money, booked my bus ticket to Lima for eleven soles and flagged down three-wheelie taxi, which took me on a beautiful wind-swept ten-minute drive over the sand dunes to the gorgeous town of Huacachina for a paltry three soles. I was positively drunk with glee when the dreamlike oasis appeared before my bloodshot eyes. I booked myself into a waterside room for fifteen soles and ordered lunch, but as it was not yet 11am I had to wait an hour for both.
No matter, I took a chew on some llipta-stuffed coca leaves and went out back to the pool area to wait. I plopped my sorry butt on an empty barstool, ordered a cerveza grande and ended up drinking the afternoon away with a trio from Alaska: Will, Michelle, and umm, the other guy. The two fellas worked the railroad up there and she was a bartender, and they were a hoot. They had a buggy/sandboarding expedition booked for 4:30 that afternoon and by four-twenty I had managed three objectives: I’d arranged the delivery of some burnable offerings for the four of us later that day, I found somebody who rolled us up a few while we waited for our ship to come in, and I had gotten pretty damn drunk.
In my spectacularly exhausted, now triple-barrelled state of intoxication I ran around the tourist strip until I found one of the dune buggy go-between dudes that I knew. Me and my buddy Steve had helped him push a broken-down buggy to a garage when I was in Huacachina about ten days earlier. It had been no easy task and to return the favour the guy promised to take us up into the desert for a quick ride the next day so we could take some pictures (neither of us had taken our cameras when we went on our dune buggy trip). Of course when push came to shove he was nowhere to be found, and when I bumped into him later by complete fluke at the Ica bus station he was all apologies and more empty promises.
But now, loaded to the gills and pumped up on the excited adrenaline of day-drinking with new friends, I found the guy out on the street and in a state of fatigue-induced dementia I managed to convince him to convince the Alaskan trio’s driver to let me tag along on their excursion for just twenty-five soles.
Can you believe Michelle and Will didn’t even want to bring sandboards? I wasn’t having any of it! I grabbed a couple of extra boards and threw them in the back of the dune buggy, assuring my fresh friends that they didn’t have to go sandboarding and at the same time promising them that they’d be very happy they had the option.
The buggy wasn’t quite as big or as powerful as the one I had been in the last time, but it was still super-fun. The other buggy caught air as it crested the dunes while this one groaned to a crawl on the bigger hills. We weren’t ten minutes into our trek when a particularly steep dune brought our buggy to a full stop, and some quick back-and-forthing quickly sank our tires like we were in quicksand. When it was clear we weren’t going anywhere without some sort of help the driver shut off the motor, turned to us with a sheepish smile and did his best to no-problem the situation:
“The desert ees beautiful, non?” he says, waving his arms at the expanse. “Maybe ees a good time to get out and take some peek-chores?” We shrugged and dug out our cameras while he radio-ed another driver to come pull us out.
We boogied around the desert for an hour or so and finally stopped at the top of a minor dune. The guides tend to start off small, working up to bigger and bigger hills until the tourists stop asking them to, but of course for everybody’s first time any hill looks massive. So while the three of them were oohing and umming I just jumped on my board and slid headfirst on my belly down the thirty-metre grade. At the bottom I leapt up and yelled, “It’s easy! Just try it!” A few moments later here comes Michelle – the most nervous of them all – and I could hear her screaming laughter the whole way down. One by one they all came down, they all loved it and just like that we’re off to another hill.
Soon we are all screaming for bigger dunes and our driver does his best to find us some good ones.
When we got to the third hill of the day I asked one of the guys to film the run on my little digital camera. I guess I jinxed myself because it proved to be my only wipeout. I was near the bottom of the hill and going fast when I hit a divot in the sand – likely caused by a previous boarder – and immediately started to tumble. For the first second-and-a-half it was a laugh, but about two seconds in I realized that I might be in trouble. I was tumbling out of control, head over heels and arms over legs like that poor polar bear in that horrible Disney clip, and I got scared in a hurry. The feeling of helplessness and the fear that came with it was highly reminiscent of my experience tumbling at the mercy of the Urubamba River when our white-water raft had flipped over. Although I was able to breathe this time, the sand dune (along with a combination of gravity and momentum) had me in it’s grasp just as strongly as that river had, and it had equal power to toss me around at will.
I guess I tumbled four or five times before I came to a stop. I wanted to let everyone know that I had landed unharmed, so I quickly jumped to my feet and did my best Rocky-reaching-the-top-of-the-library-steps-at-the-end-of-the-movie dance, but it ended up much closer to the Rocky-reaching-the-top-of-the-library-steps-at-the-beginning-of-the-movie dance because despite my eager bravado I was too shaken with vertigo to remain standing for more than a second, and I immediately fell into a heap was left staring at the sky through blurry eyes. I laid there thinking that I had surely lost my glasses – I had felt them fly off at a thousand miles an hour as I tumbled – but when I tried to stand for the second time it occurred to me that those had been my safety goggles, and even though I still couldn’t see straight my glasses were indeed intact and in place on my face. In fact everything about me seemed to be pretty much intact and in place, though my left arm was a bit bunged up for the rest of the afternoon.
Like I say, it’s all on film. If you have sixteen seconds you’re not using you can watch it here:
By the end of the day Michelle was over the moon, insisting that the afternoon of sandboarding had made up for the week-long illness she had just gotten over. Told ya so.
Back at the hostel I picked up my clean laundry* and tried in vain to shower all the sand out of my crevices, eventually convening back at the pool for more drinks with my new besties while we waited for happy hour and gigglestick to arrive. Both hit right around eight o’clock, after I had pounded eight piña colada’s in forty minutes.
In a move so clever it must have been suggested by someone more sober than I, we all went out for dinner together. We ate ourselves nearly sober for ridiculously little money and went back to the hotel where we partied away on the Alaskan’s huge balcony overlooking the pool.
By eleven o’clock Michelle was asleep. Shortly after she went to bed I peered over the balcony wall and noted that the pool area below us was actually pretty rockin’, with a dozen people partying with the staff behind the bar and girls dancing on tables and such. “Guys,” I said, taking a final pull on my beer. “I think we’re at the wrong party.”
I grabbed a fresh bottle and a pre-roll and headed down there with those two drunks hot on my heels. After a couple of hours of cd-skipping dance music I finally got fed up and decided to do something about it. Drunk and sloppy, I lumbered through at least two hundred badly scratched burned discs and could only find only one that offered any real hope. It was simply marked “beatle”. I put it on and saved the party.
Just as things seemed to be winding down suddenly Paul started singing Let It Be and every white backpacker at the bar started singing their hearts out like they were in the final round of a drunken karaoke championship. We were all forgetting and remembering the lyrics together, screwing up loudly and proudly, singing arm-in-arm in blissful unison like a slovenly version of the Tiny Dancer singalong scene in Almost Famous, but different. And then, when the song ended and it felt surely like the night was definitely over, the riff to Day Tripper leaps out of the speakers and Bam! it’s back to dancing on the tables.
It was around 4am when my head finally hit the pillow, affording me my first real sleep since I’d awoken to begin the hike up to Machu Picchu forty-eight long, crazy hours earlier.
So my last full day in Peru was actually two days. Sounds about right.
*Due to my upcoming flight through the US I deliberately left three pairs of sweat-drenched socks and a filthy t-shirt unwashed in an effort to discourage/sabotage curious customs officers and their sniffer dogs.
Todd Man Out 