Huachina-Ica-Lima
Hello people!
Hope you had a great time for New Year´s Eve, plenty of food and drinks. I also hope that you did not take any foolish resolutions that you already know you´re not gonna stick to (remember that taking NO resolutions was probably last year´s resolution). Anyway, welcome to our 2007 blog, with no new design, just the plain blog, as it was and as it will always be. Thank you "papou", "Mitte" and "Cousine cécile" for your wishes and support. Thank you "Manue" for eating our share of foie gras and finally, thank you "Blog-trotteuse" that I forgot last time, for your constant support and deep intesrest in our trip.
Well, I left you in 2006, in an dream-like oasis sunbathing by the swimming pool of our hotel...and that´s where we were this morning! Carole and I left Arequipa on the 30th at 8:30 p.m. and arrived in Ica on the 31st at 6:30 a.m. There´s pretty much nothing to do in Ica so early in the morning and we could hardly find a café open for an early breakfast. According to the Lonely Planet, Ica has some good museums and...that´s it! You know us and the museums...We knew that the oasis of Huacachina was only 4 kms away and we had planned to spend New Year´s Eve there. We thought that all the hostels would be full so we decided to go straight to Huacachina. We made the right decision, it´s lovely. We stayed in the "Casa de arena" which has a swimming-pool and a nice bar. Havind dropped our bags in the room, we explored the oasis and grabbed some food. The oasis is fairly small. In the center there´s a small lake, which water used to be known for its healing properties. Five years ago the site changed completely when some Israelis started to surf the dunes. Local people had never thought about that! Now it´s everywhere. I´ll come back to this later...
In the evening we bought some ticket for a party organised by the hotel. Brilliant! All the "gringos" together for New Year´s Eve. It started at 8:00 p.m (when most of you were already in 2007) and it started very slowly. There was almost no music, the food (included) was OK but small and we did not know anyone. Boring...Eventually, the Pisco Sour and Cuba Libre helped (about 10 of them were needed) and we started to talk to our fellow travelers, who all seemed to know each other already. We had free drinks from 8:00 p.m to 10:00 p.m. so, you bet that we took advantage of these two hours! We all filled our cups, glasses and whatever container we could find just before 10:00 so that we would not die dehydrated at midnight. Then came 2007 and a bit of amateur fireworks and that was it. There´s nothing like being with your friends for New Year´s Eve, you don´t need no swimming pool in an oasis to have fun. We went to bed at 12:01.
However, on the 1st of January 2007, when we woke up at 10:00 relatively well, with the sun high in the Tomorrow, we´ll explore the city center, the coast (Lima has some cliffs and the Pacific) and we´ll also confirm our flight to Cancún, Mexico on the 5th. I´ll write to you before that, don´t worry. That´s all folks!
bright blue sky, then we were happy to have a swimming pool. We spent the morning and most of the afternoon sunbathing, swimming and playing volleyball. At 4:00 p.m. we joined a group for a tour in the dunes called : Buggy and Sandsurf. There were 8 of us in a giant buggy, soaring in the dunes, jumping in the sand. These monster cars are so fast, it´s awesome! The driver stopped on top of a dune and asked us to grab our sandboard for practice. Two guys and an american girl apparantly had some experience in snowboard, so off they went down the dune. It was fun to see them although they were rather "sandbumming" than sandboarding, filling their pants with sand and running after their board. Personnaly, unexperienced, I did it like most of the other guys, on my tummy, lying on the board. It´s fun, you´re so close to the ground that you feel like you´re going so fast! We´ve tried a few small dunes before taking the buggy to the "real ones". It´s very impressive when you´re looking down the slope. Carole had the guts to do it like a confirmed snowbarder and it went well for the first dune. The second wasn´t so good and the guide promised he would give her name to the dune, a tradition in Huacachina. A few more dunes and it was time to admire the sunset in the desert. Beaaauuuutiful, gooorgeous. A bit more of adrenaline in the buggy and we were back in our hostel, relaxing in the delightfully warm water of the swimming pool. Aaaaaaaah, that´s what I call holidays. 
Today was more quiet. We spent the morning sunbathing again, had a late breakfast and checked out at 12:00. We took a "motocar" to Ica (with that strange man pretending to steal my bag) and hopped on a bus to Lima. It´s a 4-hour trip which proved to be a 5-hour trip. The journey wasn´t incomfortable as there was a TV on the bus. We watched a comedy (some kind of James Bond-like movie with a 15-year old secret agent who happened to be the actor of "Malcom in the middle") and "Fearless" with Jet Li. Upon arriving in Lima, a taximan was waiting for us and gave us some advice on a hostel in the Miraflores district. It´s safe and quiet. We took the dorms ´cause it´s so much more expensive in Lima (70 Soles for a Double Bedroom, when we paid 60 Soles for 2 days in Huacachina). The time to eat a pizza and here I am in front of my PC writing our tale.