Huacachina is a small patch of green in the middle of Southern Peru, surrounded in all directions by sand dunes.
Nature has a way of making you feel one of two sensations. A grueling three hour hike leaves you at the top of a mountain, and you feel like King of the Wild Frontier. But at the same time, the immensity of the rock façade and the stretch of forest that goes as far as the eye can see has the ability to reduce you to feeling like an ant among giants. My experience sandboarding in the sand dunes of Huacachina was of the latter sentiment.
Huacachina is a small patch of green in the middle of Southern Peru, surrounded in all directions by sand dunes. The main attraction in this part of the world is going for a dune buggy ride and then sandboarding down the massive piles of sand. The main street of the town is lined with excursion storefronts; luckily the hotel arranged my trip and I did not have to deal with the bartering store attendants.
Once the dune buggies, which bear a greater resemblance to a contraption than a legitimate motor vehicle, took off into the dunes, the extensiveness of the sand around you really sinks in. My driver gunned it straight into mountain of sand, quickly turning off as we hit the peak, catching seconds of air that made it seem as though time had stopped. Returning to earth with four wheels on the ground, I unclenched hands that had reflexively tightened around metal handles at my sides.
When we finally stopped at the top of a sand peak, I precariously stepped out of the buggy. My legs were a little unsteady after charging up and down mountain after mountain of sand, feeling the centripetal force push me back into my seat. From where I now stood, everything was sand – sand in front of me, behind, to the left and to the right. The vastness of my surroundings made me conscious of just how big the world really is; miles of sand were around me, yet Huacachina is just one small city, in one South American country, on one of seven continents, in this big place we call Earth.
