Peru Part 1: Fun with Sand Dunes

I am finally getting around to writing about my trip to Peru. It was years ago, but it hardly seems like that much time has passed since I was there, but my fingers don’t lie.

Knowing that I would be alone on my trip I wasn’t too keen on leaving Guatemala. It was hard to say good-bye to the G family and take that 4 am shuttle bus to the airport. I would have been happy to stay longer, not in the school, but with the family. However, it was the 18th of August and I had already postponed my trip by about two weeks. My flight took off over an hour late, there was a two-hour layover in Costa Rica, and then at about five o’clock I landed in Peru. The sun still shone through a thick haze and I was glad that night had not yet fallen. From the airport I booked a hotel room and opted for the taxi bus as my form of transport. My second suitcase had to be gotten rid of, so I took it to the luggage storage. It cost fifty bucks to store a jam-packed, nearly-bursting-at-the-seams, ten-year-old suitcase. They had lost a group’s luggage and were frantically searching the entire room for the missing bags. The people were antsy; their flight had started boarding. After waiting an hour (checking in and checking out bags is apparently a time-consuming process) I was down to one bag, my backpack and a bus ticket to my hotel.

The hotel was close to the bus station and far from the city center. It seemed like I was the only guest in the hotel. After playing in the bathroom sink, it was my first opportunity to see water drain out counter-clockwise,I went out to find a bakery and bought some food for the night and the next day. That was the first time that I realized that my Guatemalan Spanish differed from Peruvian Spanish, the pronunciation was different and certain words just didn’t work for me. In the end I got what I wanted and returned to the hotel in a light drizzle. I ate, took a hot shower and memorized the next day’s itinerary. My nerves made it impossible to sleep for most of the night, but early in the morning I drifted off and only reluctantly responded to my faithful alarm clock.

Around 8:30 I bought a 9:00am bus ticket to Ica. The bus departed at 9:45. Unbeknownst to me I had managed to get myself on the Royal Class bus, which as you might guess from the name, was the most expensive. It was approximately a three-hour ride through sand dunes to Ica. After about twenty minutes the landscape became monotonous and I happily watched “Anna and the King” on the TV screens. It was subtitled in Spanish, and for most of the ride I was forced to read them because the sound was inaudible. About an hour before arrival we were fed our Royal Class meal, which consisted of a bun sliced in half, generously stuffed with one thin slice of chicken and one leaf of lettuce. Two nutty cookies and a cup of Inca Kola accompanied this miniature feast. Inca Kola is not for me, this Peruvian beverage is florescent yellow and tastes of bubble gum.

Ica was the first stop on the bus line and the first stop for me as well. After collecting my things and inquiring about the next day’s bus schedule to Nazca I walked around Ica for a bit trying to locate the bus station for a different line of buses, but couldn’t find it. Near the center square a young man who desired to escort me to a reasonably priced hotel and show me around town accosted this innocent little fish. The traveling fish repeatedly told him that she wasn’t interested but he wasn’t interested in taking no for an answer. Traffic whizzed around the square and wouldn’t you know it, an empty taxi pulled up right next to the gringa without her having to even lift her little finger. I asked the taxista how much to Huacachina. The young man continued to help and the taxista thought that he was the gringa’s enamorado. I quickly clarified the situation and he became distressed saying that perhaps the joven had followed me from Lima. From that moment on, he regarded himself as my guardian angel. He recommended the local museum, which even had a replica of one the Nazca biomorphs on a smaller scale, but it was already closed for the day and would open only one hour before the bus to Nazca the next morning. The taxista was reluctant to leave this little fish in Huacachina, he told me that the hotels were expensive and that they were probably full. But I insisted on staying so he drove me to my hotel of choice and had to be reassured that I would be alright before he would drive off and leave me.

The room was the cheapest I was to stay in. At the time 10 soles was about $3. That is how much the room cost. Mind you, cheap hotel rooms are usually lacking in certain luxuries. This room had a private bathroom, with no hot water, no toilet paper, no soap, and no toilet seat, but it wasn’t cold at night.

I left my things and took off to walk around the laguna. It was small with a row of buildings around three sides of it. Most of the buildings appeared boarded up with peeling paint in bright 70’s seaside colors, but there were plenty people about. Some took out pedal boats, but the majority played in the sand. Huacachina is surrounded by tall sand dunes. There are sand boards for rent, which are a bit like snowboards, and anyone can spend a few hours sliding down the dunes. This little fish, who is not fond of downhill skiing, riding a bicycle down hill or even of being a passenger in a car in Seattle or San Francisco contented herself with a hike up the dunes. I picked the one that looked the tallest and set out to climb it. I must have been crazy when a few years earlier I had asked a friend to climb the tallest mountain in Malaysia with me. The sand fought me. The wind deposited grains of sand in every imaginable crack and crevice of my body, covered or not. My lungs insisted that they were not trained for climbing anything more than a flight of stairs. So I stopped, sat down and admired the view. When they had stopped their whining I continued, eventually reaching the top. I practiced my tightrope act at the summit following the hills over to the other side of the Hauacachina oasis. Only a small trail crawled across the top of the dunes and then the sides went plunging down. I remembered how when I had taken MF and P to Iximche they had rolled down the grassy hills like human logs. I fought with the childish temptation to do the same, the height alone dissuaded me from attempting it. A plastic bag carwheeled down the dune and I lived the moment vicariously.

After sitting awhile along the ridge and enjoying the view, I tired of how the sand would jump up over the peak and sting me, not to mention that my ears were filling up with sand, so I decided to walk back down. But I wasn’t ready to leave them just yet. This little fish forged a new trail down the back, running half way down to the side of the next dune. There I found a cauldron like area where I could play games with my shadow. Inspiration struck, I was traveling alone and would have very few pictures of myself, not that it bothered me, but usually those were the pictures that people really wanted to see. So I planned a self-portrait. I positioned my shadow against the side of the tall dune, framed the picture and CLICK! My shadow was in the box.

At one point, our little fish found herself on top of another dune with the only trail leading back the way she had come, but she refused to return by a path already traveled. I so she plunged down the side of the dune into a valley where I had earlier seen a small ant-like person crossing, his singing rising with the wind. I weaved in and out of smaller dunes wondering how much longer it would be until the sun set. Coming out of the dunes on the way back to the hotel this little fish met with a family of four who were curious to speak with her. Their oldest son, K was 9. They were from Ica and wanted to know all about our little traveler. They had already spent a good twenty minutes talking when the mother asked me if I liked “bitha.” This fish claimed no knowledge of anything called “bitha.” Eventually I understood that “bitha” was pizza, but this only after the mom insisted on bringing me a “bitha” that evening to my hotel room.

This little fish returned to her room, took a cold shower and only managed to remove a fraction of the sand that had invaded her body. Sleep kept calling me to bed, but I reminded sleep that a “bitha” was coming and that I couldn’t turn in yet. Until 9pm I waited, but they did not return. I crawled under the covers and slept gratefully.