Oh Mr. Sandman....

One major misconception I had about South America was that it was perpetually hot and tropical. Not so. I mean, obviously if you go as far south as Canada is north you get a true winter where you’d expect it to be freezing during the winter and temperate during the summer. But, since we got to South America it has NEVER warmed up for us. Buenos Aires was cold and rainy. Patagonia was frigid and snowy. Passing through Chile brought us sunshine but with bitter winds and highs in the low teens (the ocean was unbearably cold there too). Enter Peru. Ahhhh….balmy Peru with its palm trees and picturesque beaches. I figured it HAD to be warm in Peru – we’re practically at the equator for God’s sake! Not so. We spent the last three weeks above 3000 m and so we were stuck in a perpetual early spring (I had to wear a hat and scarf in Cuzco!). Finally we’d had enough. “Screw it”, we said. “Let’s go to the desert!”. FINALLY some tropical weather! We ended up in Huacachina, Peru, an oasis town of 600 people in the middle of a sahara-like desert. The main attractions there are sunshine and sandboarding (which I rip at…kinda). We took an epic ride into the dunes on a macro-scale version of the mini-baja dune buggy Elise and I helped build in university. As the former captain of the suspension team for the McGill Mini-Baja, I was extremely impressed with the ride quality until my brand new knock-off Ray-Bans were jostled from head. I hope some desperate soul stranded in that unforgiving land appreciates them some day.

To give you an idea of the scale of geography in the pics below, one of the dunes we sandboarded down was about half the size of Blue Mountain (sorry, you need to live in Southern Ontario to understand that, but suffice it to say that that is a downright mammoth heap of sand). Sandboarding is pretty much just like snowboarding on fresh pow-pow (that’s shredder slang for ‘powder’) except that when you bail you can guarantee you’ll be picking sand out of your eyes and ears for the next hour. Also, you have to haul your sorry ass back up the dune after each run, which, expectedly, sucks. Oh yeah, and while it gets boiling hot during the day, like most deserts the air in Huacachina gets icy-cold at night. The search for summer continues…..

-G