Day Twelve

It was an eventful, very gritty, weekend. On Friday a large portion of PSF headed off to Lima for a Pearl Jam concert, and many of us who remained behind left on Saturday afternoon for Huacachina, a tiny tourist town just outside of Lima. Huacachina is sort of a bizarre place. An oasis in the middle of towering sand dunes that stretch for interminable miles, Huacahina is basically a very warm pond surrounded by palm trees. For a few hundred yards in any direction from the pond there are streets and buildings, mostly hostels and restaurants, and beyond that nothing but mountains of sand. Walking around Huacachina, I kept on getting the impression that the entire town was about to be buried.

After a party at the hostel Saturday night, Sunday morning was spent recuperating by the pool. It felt odd to relax under palm trees in a beach chair. My experiences in Peru thus far have been very far from that. Then in the afternoon we headed out to the dunes. We did this by riding, along with a few other tourists, all english speaking, in a dune buggy driven by a man who is paid to drive like a lunatic. Think a roller coaster, only substitute a coaster cart for a reinforced ATV, and instead of being in an amusement park, it's on Tatooine. Then we went sand-boarding, which consists of standing, kneeling, or lying on a fiberglass board as it zips down the side of a huge dune. A lot of fun, but I think it'll be a few weeks before I get all the sand out of my hair.

Speaking of which, at the moment we have no water here at PSF. Earlier this evening, unfortunately before I got to take a shower, the water pressure disappeared. This has apparently happened before, though not since I've been here. A few minutes ago I joined a group riding the truck down to the beach to get water in buckets and trash barrels so that we'll be able to flush the toilets. Evidently last time this wasn't done as promptly, there was some backup in the toilets, and a lot of people got typhoid. You get the idea.

Life in Pisco is many things, but, thus far at least, it is never boring.