Sandboarding and Pisco

There are two things to do in the oasis town of Huacachina, sandboarding and pisco tasting.  We did them both last week. 

The oasis town, sand dunes in the background.

The oasis town from the dunes.

Sandboarding is not an "enhanced interrogation technique".  Sandboarding is what you do when you live in a desert, have a bunch of gringo thirll seekers ready and willing to throw money at you, and a surplus of crapy makeshift snowboards at your disposal.  Last week, for a mere 18 US Dollars, we went out for a 2 hour dune buggy and sandboarding adventure.  It was AWESOME.

The dune buggy ride in and of itself was an amazing experience.  6 of us were strapped into a metal contraption that was twisted and formed into what somewhat resembles a car.  We then darted off into the sand dunes around 4:00pm, the driver immediately doing his best to flip the contraption by taking hairpin turns at ungodly speeds.  Though that was scary, the most nerve racking part was when we would go straight up a dune, get to the top, and slowly tip over and cascade down the backside of a dune. 

Me on top of the dune buggy!

After about an hour of zipping around the dunes, we stopped at the top of a mid sized dune and unloaded the boards.  Jason and I attempted to take the first dune standing up, like the pros we thought we were, but quickly saw that the way to go was to lie on your belly and slide down.  That, and we could get about 20 yards before falling flat on our behinds.  Sliding on your belly you went about 5x faster.  After messing around on the small dune for about half an hour, we went around to 5 more BIG dunes.  Here are some videos from the experience, including an AWESOME wipeout by Jason (nothing hurt, except pride). Elisabeth definitely was the best, she is incredibly aerodynamic. (It took me roughly 4 hours to upload these videos.  Ugh, how I long for high speed internet!)

The day post sand boarding, we went off to do a more relaxed activity -- wine and pisco tasting at some local distilleries.  We made two stops, first to the largest winery in Peru, Vista Alegre.  We had a decent tour in English, and were able to sample 4-5 wines.  The wines weren't anything to rave about, and we were all slightly underwhelmed with the whole experience.  Expectations were low as we set out to the next stop, a small, local pisco distillery.  Fortunately this stop more than made the day.  Our guide was a young, hillarious peruvian who took us through all the steps in making pisco (grape brandy).  Though the guide had only been speaking english for about 9 months (so he said), he was nearly fluent!  His vocabulary was spectacular though, as he alwyas picks up sland from the various international folk he is giving a tour to.  We enhanced his vocabulary by introducing him to the worh ¨hella¨.  After the half hour tour, we sat down and sampled 6 different kinds of Pisco.  I actually quite liked the pisco, it has a very mild taste and nearly no smell.  We spent about an hour laughing and drinking with our guide, before we hoped in the taxi and headed back to our hostal for some R&R.

The various pisco's we tasted.

Our hostel pool. Cost us a whole $10 bucks a night.