Peru - Huacachina

My second destination in Peru after Lima was Huacachina - the oasis town. It looks really cool in the pics, in reality it's not that amazing. The water in the lake is pretty gross and there isn't much around. But what you come for to Huacachina is some SAND SURFING and sand buggy rides and I did just that. 

To get to Huacachina I took a coach from Lima, which in itself was quite a stressful event for me. Firstly, most South American countries are notorious for terrible road safety statistics. Secondly, bus hijacking were not unheard of in Peru, especially on popular tourist routes. Luckily everything went well and I could see they were putting a lot of effort into trying to maintain high standards of safety. Before we departed, they walked around the coach taking camera recordings of all passengers (to discourage hijackings), and also videotaped the driver taking the alcohol test. Pretty intense! I arrived at Ica, a town nearby Huacachina, late in the evening, and took a cab to my accommodation. Before we departed i took a picture of the taxi plates to send to Zach just in case, and the driver looked a little amused/offended/surprised. He said all everyone is interested in is earning their wages, and so I needn't do such things as reporting their plates to my family. Well dear sir, excuse me for exhibiting a fair amount of caution as a single female traveller, taking a taxi at night from the middle of nowhere to another middle of nowhere in the desert... 

The hostel I stayed at was okay, but it was a bit weird sharing a room with 4 older people... they were visibly surprised they had a roomie, clearly they weren't used to how hostels worked :)

The buggy ride was pretty fun, felt a bit like a rollercoaster. Tension builds up while you're slowly climbing up... then you get to the top and you get a sudden rush of adrenaline when you see how steep down it is on the other side... and then some screams on the way down :) The sand surfing was good fun too, although unfortunately I was a little bit too scared to let go enough to develop some better speeds which I think would've been more fun. You see I obviously did a bunch of research on those activities and inevitably I came across some news about tourists being seriously injured. Standard procedure for me, always freaking out :)