I've left Lima with two Brits from my dorm room who were, coincidentally, also heading to Cuzco for the big festival on the 24th, and spent the night before last in Huacachina, the Oasis in the desert (it's literally a little tourist town built around a lagoon in the middle of thousands of miles of sand dunes). It was beautiful! We spent the night playing poker and drinking with a group of very cool Irish folks, then woke up, did a wine tour, and went SANDBOARDING!!!
Sandboarding, for those of you who don't know (I didn't), is basically snowboarding. On sand dunes. It was one of the coolest things I've ever tried! It cost about US$12 (40 soles) for two hours, and they take a group of you out in a wicked dune buggy and let you slide your way down the dunes on a snowboard-type-structure. We whipped through the desert at light speed, throwing sand and speeding down steep dunes, and then would stop for a while and ride down. It's terrifying at first, but you get the hang of it fast. For the last run, we stopped at the top this ridiculously steep, tall dune, and people were going down laying on the board head-first!
It was so, so fun.
You're down the hill in a matter of seconds! Totally wild. Then we spent another half hour ripping through the desert and we got to see a sunset :) Beautiful, unearthly colors glowed the whole sky and the sand looked like the surface of the moon. It was incredible. I 100% recommend trying sandboarding, or at least dunebuggying; it's totally wild!
So tomorrow morning we're off to Cuzco for the Inca Festival (a few days spent partying in the streets and 1000s of people flood the city is all I've heard of it, but that's enough to drag me there), which should be a blast.
