Friday, October 10, 2008
Tuesday, 9.30: Lima to Huacachina
Completely underwhelmed with the city of Lima, we were anxious to get on to our desert adventure. So after another unappetizing-but-free breakfast and one last e-mail/Facebook check, Bri and I bid the Mildew Shanty a very welcome farewell and hailed a taxi for the bus station. We got there a couple hours before our bus was scheduled to depart, but we figured it was better waiting around at the clean bus station than at the Mildew Shanty. We checked our backpacks (yes, there was a bag check at the bus station—they don’t fool around with their buses in Peru) and then headed up to the snack bar to get something to eat (and, in my case, to be endlessly amused by the sign on the counter offering pieces of “pye”).
At around 1:00, we got in line to board the bus and were soon settled in our seats on the top level. As indicated by the baggage check, bus travel in Peru is a lot like plane travel—the seats are big and cushy (bigger and cushier than plane seats, actually), and there’s even beverage and food service. So maybe bus travel in Peru is like plane travel used to be. However, there was one similarity between Peruvian buses and their American counterparts—their fondness for showing awful movies. Our selections on the ride down included Along Came Polly (bad) and Last Holiday (worse). Incidentally, the bus I took from D.C. to New York earlier in the year also screened a Queen Latifah movie. What is it with Queen Latifah movies and long-distance bus travel?
Anyway. Other than a brief stop in Paracas (which we decided looked very nice, and had us wishing we’d built some time for it into our itinerary), we cruised right down the coast to Ica, arriving shortly after dark. Bri and I hailed a taxi at the bus station to drive us the 5 miles or so to Huacachina. No sooner had we turned out of the bus station, though, than we got pulled over by a cop, and the cab driver got out of the car to talk to him. I guess whatever offense he’d committed had been minor, because he soon got back in the car, and we were on our way. He tried to talk us into booking him for a winery tour the next day (Ica is close to Pisco, where they make the famous liquor used to make pisco sours), passing us a book filled with testimonials from other travelers, but we demurred, and somehow managed to get out of the car without being roped into it.
We’d made reservations at El Huacachinero, one of the few hotels in town, before leaving the Mildew Shanty, so after checking in and dumping our bags, we decided to have a little look around the town of Huacachina, which was our first introduction to the eeriness of it. Huacachina is this tiny little desert oasis that was once the resort town of choice for Peruvian royalty (it was so popular that a picture of it even appears on one of their currency notes), but is now pretty much deserted except for the backpackers who come in search of cheap accommodations and the chance to go dune-buggying and sandboarding in the desert (which was totally why we’d come, too). When we were there, there didn’t even seem to be that many backpackers, so after wandering up and down the street (and being followed by a stray dog who, while nice enough, was no Hermie the Worm-Eating Dog of Chiang Dao), we decided to just go back to our hotel and eat. We stopped at the front desk to book our sandboarding tour for the next day, then gave in to the Italian-food pressure (it seemed even more prominent in Huacachina than elsewhere in Peru) and ate pasta by the pool before calling it a night.
Continue to Day 13: Huacachina
Completely underwhelmed with the city of Lima, we were anxious to get on to our desert adventure. So after another unappetizing-but-free breakfast and one last e-mail/Facebook check, Bri and I bid the Mildew Shanty a very welcome farewell and hailed a taxi for the bus station. We got there a couple hours before our bus was scheduled to depart, but we figured it was better waiting around at the clean bus station than at the Mildew Shanty. We checked our backpacks (yes, there was a bag check at the bus station—they don’t fool around with their buses in Peru) and then headed up to the snack bar to get something to eat (and, in my case, to be endlessly amused by the sign on the counter offering pieces of “pye”).
At around 1:00, we got in line to board the bus and were soon settled in our seats on the top level. As indicated by the baggage check, bus travel in Peru is a lot like plane travel—the seats are big and cushy (bigger and cushier than plane seats, actually), and there’s even beverage and food service. So maybe bus travel in Peru is like plane travel used to be. However, there was one similarity between Peruvian buses and their American counterparts—their fondness for showing awful movies. Our selections on the ride down included Along Came Polly (bad) and Last Holiday (worse). Incidentally, the bus I took from D.C. to New York earlier in the year also screened a Queen Latifah movie. What is it with Queen Latifah movies and long-distance bus travel?
Anyway. Other than a brief stop in Paracas (which we decided looked very nice, and had us wishing we’d built some time for it into our itinerary), we cruised right down the coast to Ica, arriving shortly after dark. Bri and I hailed a taxi at the bus station to drive us the 5 miles or so to Huacachina. No sooner had we turned out of the bus station, though, than we got pulled over by a cop, and the cab driver got out of the car to talk to him. I guess whatever offense he’d committed had been minor, because he soon got back in the car, and we were on our way. He tried to talk us into booking him for a winery tour the next day (Ica is close to Pisco, where they make the famous liquor used to make pisco sours), passing us a book filled with testimonials from other travelers, but we demurred, and somehow managed to get out of the car without being roped into it.
We’d made reservations at El Huacachinero, one of the few hotels in town, before leaving the Mildew Shanty, so after checking in and dumping our bags, we decided to have a little look around the town of Huacachina, which was our first introduction to the eeriness of it. Huacachina is this tiny little desert oasis that was once the resort town of choice for Peruvian royalty (it was so popular that a picture of it even appears on one of their currency notes), but is now pretty much deserted except for the backpackers who come in search of cheap accommodations and the chance to go dune-buggying and sandboarding in the desert (which was totally why we’d come, too). When we were there, there didn’t even seem to be that many backpackers, so after wandering up and down the street (and being followed by a stray dog who, while nice enough, was no Hermie the Worm-Eating Dog of Chiang Dao), we decided to just go back to our hotel and eat. We stopped at the front desk to book our sandboarding tour for the next day, then gave in to the Italian-food pressure (it seemed even more prominent in Huacachina than elsewhere in Peru) and ate pasta by the pool before calling it a night.
Continue to Day 13: Huacachina
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