The polls will be closing at midnight on Wednesday for the guinea pig vote. The little guy is losing 21-19, he’s up against the ropes, so i’m hoping the California vote will get out to the polls. C`MON HIPPIE FRIENDS, I reaaaly don’t want to eat the filthy rat.
Here`s the url again if you havn`t voted. (again, no voting twice)
http://perpetualharvest.biz/poll.htm
So, I found myself in Haucachina, Peru: in the coastal desert, south of Lima. There, tucked amid towering sand dunes, was a *classic* desert oasis. The town is pretty much a patch of palm trees in the middle of nowhere. People here take their siestas very seriously. For most of the day, Huacachina simmers in half-slumber and jovial half-assedness. But every day at 4:00pm, the town’s purpose rumbles and rattles to life. This is dunebuggy country. All over town cobbled-together buggies with megaphone exhausts spit and backfire into effect. Late afternoons are when the sand dunes are their hottest and dryest: the optimal conditions for sandboarding.
I’ve been snowboarding for 10 years and surfing for 7, I wanted to try my hand at riding sand. Behind the hotel, my buggie tour assembled. Our buggie was a classic VW Beetle conversion with an red rollbars and an air-cooled engine. Our driver was gritty-smiled man in his early 30´s, named Kike. A 25-year resident of Huacachina, Kike told me whenever life gets to be too much he takes his 5-year old son and drives the dunes all day. He said it fixes everything. I said I could relate.
Kike transformed himself into the spit of “The Red Barron”: donning a floppy-eared hat and alien-eye goggles. We thundered out of town into the sand. The horizon opened up to apocaliptic nothingness. There was not a single shrub or blade of grass as far as the eye could see: only mountains of loose, blowing sand. The buggy is Kike´s pride and joy, and he was anxious to show us what it can do. He started in with some wicked 4-wheel drifting and then used sand berms to bank into extended
2-wheel drifts. He floored it and headed straight for a huge, steep
dune. The afternoon air was warm, our seatbelts were broken. The front wheels launched off the crest, when they settled back into soft sand 15 feet later we in freefall on the steep other side of the dune. Kike never let off the gas. The two skinny Irish girls occupying the other two buggie seats were screaming and cussing. I shreiked like a little girl and i’m ok with that.
We parked the buggy at the top of a huge dune; our first sandboard run. Sandboards here are homemade: a piece of plywood bent up on the ends with slick plastic laminated on the bottom. You wax them with a regular candle. I wrapped the velcro straps around my shoes and scooted towards the edge. The sand here is like Limantour Beach: incredibly fine and light. The dune erodes in that familiar “mini avalanch” pattern: just like fresh snow. The sensation is not unlike sliding on late-season Tahoe “Sierra cement”. The difference is, sand is much heavier and not as slick as snow. Without sufficient velocity, sandboards halt suddenly and throw you over the handlebars. I learned this the hard way on my first run when snowboard muscle-memory kicked in and I dug an edge too deep. I went cartwheeling down the dune. Crashes on sand are quite fun: it’s soft but alot of sand gets wedged in your ears.
By the fourth or fith run I had the hang of it. We went to progressively bigger and steeper dunes until we ran out of daylight. We sat in the sand and watched a brilliant orange sunset over the sand abyss. I sat and pondered the nothingness and how in bloody hell all this sand got piled 30km from the Pacific. When the sun dipped we thundered back to the hotel, but my time on the dunes was something i’ll never forget. And it seems the dunes do not care to allow one to forget. They don’t advertise it, but every tour comes with a free tour-reminder: It`s been almost a week and i’m still picking sand out of random bodily nooks and crannies.
*** Thanks for all your hillarious comments and thanks for reading, everyone!!! *** Guinea pigs aside, the next email promises to be very special, so catch you soon. :)
–Lucas
