Hacienda, Dunes and Sand-boarding in Ica

I truly regret forgetting my digital camera in a friend's car before leaving on my trip to Ica with Beto. In this southern desert region, my friend Neil has a huge 600 hectar hacienda. I met Neil and his girlfriend Thais through Beto when Amelia, an American friend of my aunt, came to visit from Buenos Aires. Neil's hacienda, an absolutely amazing place, includes: a pisco factory, 100 horses, 100 ostriches, 100 cows, several species of monkeys and birds and various other animals including an alpaca, an endangered specie of llama. Several types of crops were grown on the hacienda and it is my understanding that family employs 150 families during the harvest season. Their most profitable crop is asparagus, but they have quite a variety.

A large part of Neil's family's property extends into the desert and they maintain several dune buggies and motorcycles to navigate the terrain. Neil told me stories about exploring the desert and finding an old Inca temple when he was a child. He showed me the ancient artifacts he and his brothers extracted from the site. The pottery and ancient objects in their living room looked like they belonged in a museum. Most remarkable were wooden stirrups for the horses of the Spanish conquistadors and a carved snake staff. He joked about playing with the mummies they found at the site.

Neil gave us a tour of their pisco factory. Pisco is a distilled spirit made from grapes and about 45% alcohol (think Peru's vodka or tequila). It is mixed with egg white and lime to make "Pisco Sour", Peru's famous drink. I think it goes more or less through the same process as "eau de vie" in France. Their brand recently won an award for the best pisco in Peru, which is probably attributed to their recent investment in a special $200,000 machine that better separates the alcohol after fermentation. Neil showed me the whole process, which takes as little as 6 months including squishing the grapes, boiling and fermenting the juices, and letting it sit in big metal canisters for several months. The tasting was intoxicating and I nearly killed Beto and myself cutting a close corner in the dune buggy driving back to the main compound.

That day, Neil and Thais had to return to Lima and Beto and I continued down to Huacachina, an oasis in the middle of the desert. Entirely a tourist destination, Huacachina attracts adventurers from around the world for its sheer beauty and the opportunity to conquer the gigantic dunes atop a snowboard. I later found out that more than half the tourists were Israeli soldiers (men and women) that recently finished their 2-3 years of service. I had some intense conversations with a young man that served primarily in the West Bank. What struck me most was that the war he fought was only an hour drive from where he and his family lived (unlike American soldiers in Iraq). I told him a Dutch girl I had met mentioned that she thought Israelis were rude, but he explained to me that in a military society, you become accustomed to taking what you need and sharing everything. I asked him if this was due to their constant proximity to death and he paused to think. In the end, though, I found that he and most of the Israelis just wanted to forget their experience as much as possible, whether through travel or drug use or a combination of the two.

Sand boarding was not a concept I had ever really thought about, but ended up being one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Just getting to the tops of these giant mountains of sand, riding over abrupt drops in the buggies, was scarier than any rollercoaster I've been on. To get optimal speed and minimal traction, the boards must be waxed, though I noticed one guide substituting mayonnaise for wax. Standing on the boards was quite intimating at the top of what would be a black diamond in the skiing world. After plopping on my butt a couple times, I opted for the second method: sledding down head first. My legs hung off the back for balance and brake. Really.. an indescribable sensation, like ski-diving, but in the setting of utter natural beauty of the dunes.