Sand mountains

Halfway up, I stopped calling it a dune. Steffi had already renamed it a sand mountain, and calf-deep on its flank, sinking into the sand with every step, I couldn’t fault her. The climb was only fifteen minutes, which sounds like nothing. Imagine the softest, sandiest beach you’ve ever trudged along, then tilt it steeply uphill, and you have some idea of why we got slower and slower the higher we went. Neither of us wanted to give up, but by the last stretch to the ridge we were barely moving.

We had been up since five that morning, collected from our Lima hotel at 5:20 with a breakfast-to-go in a paper bag from reception. The bus ran south along a coast that looked more like Egypt with every kilometre: unfinished buildings, desert sand, rubbish drifting along the roadside. Steffi slept and I finished my Brandon Sanderson book. The morning went to a boat tour around the Paracas islands, the ones they call the Peruvian Galapagos, all sea lion pups and rock arches and a Humboldt penguin. Then another hour on the bus, and Huacachina appeared: a tiny oasis town with a lagoon and palm trees, completely swallowed by the biggest sand dunes we had ever seen. We got out, stunned by the size of them, and started climbing.

On the ridge, we did what we have done at scenic spots all over the world since our wedding: we sent the drone up and attempted our wedding dance. On the peak of a sand mountain, a dance becomes something else entirely. The sand swallowed every step, the slope kept tipping us sideways, and the wind shoved the drone around while it tried to film us. We laughed our way through it more than we danced through it, but the footage exists.

Then we ran down. This is the great secret of sand mountains: the climb is torture but the descent is amazing. Each bounding step landed cushioned and soft, and we covered in about a minute what had taken fifteen going up. We reached the bottom with wobbly legs and walked straight over to the dune buggies, where the day promptly changed gears.

There were about eight of us in the buggy, and the driver was a quiet man who barely said a word. He let the dunes do the talking. He drove up and over them so fast it felt like a rollercoaster with no rails, the whole buggy laughing and screaming over every crest. His masterpiece came at a dune that ended in a sheer sandy cliff, where another buggy was parked at the edge for sandboarding. He slowed right down, rolling gently towards the parked buggy as if to pull up beside it. Then he floored it off the cliff. All eight of us screamed as we dropped straight down the face. He came back around, lined up the same edge, let us brace for round two, and stopped just in time, smiling and laughing at what he had done to us.

Sandboarding at Huacachina is done on your belly, face-first, which means the kind of slope you just screamed down in a buggy is now approaching your chin at speed. It was genuinely scary, and we loved it. Each dune we boarded was higher than the last, and we improved as we went, tucking in, picking up speed, sliding further and further along the run-outs at the bottom. What I loved most were the big drops, that moment where the slope falls away beneath you and you simply keep accelerating. Neither of us wiped out on the big ones, which we chose to interpret as talent.

By the time the boards were done with us, the sky had turned pink, and the tour parked us up high in the dunes for sunset. The dunes rolled to the horizon in soft pink and shadow, and we took our photos before heading back. Then we walked down out of the dunes to the oasis itself, a little beach on the lagoon ringed by palm trees, and it was beautiful.

It was down by the oasis that we finally took our shoes off. Each one held what I can only describe as a serviceable home sandpit. We poured them out, and then discovered that the shoes had been the least of it, because sandboarding face-first down mountains had distributed sand into every private place two humans possess. We got on the bus to Lima carrying our own portable desert.

Somewhere in those four dark hours back up the coast, Steffi delivered her verdict: this was by far her favourite adventure of the year. We talked it over and agreed this was the most stunning desert we had seen, ahead even of Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum was natural beauty; this was pure adventure, with far bigger dunes and a palm-fringed oasis hiding between them. I didn’t argue. I just shifted in my seat, felt the sand shift with me, and let the verdict stand.

Based on 09.02, Paracas and Huacachina, Peru.