7th - 9th July 2007

We left Nazca as soon as we could after our flight and headed about 2 hours down the road to Ica an oasis town in the middle of the desert. This place was crazy. There were thousands of taxis, tuk tuks, people rushing through the streets everywhere and armed security on all of the cafe doors. We suddenly felt like we were back in Asia again, it was hot and mad! But it was a pleasant enough place with a decent Plaza de Aramas in the center. We had taken to spending copious amounts of hours sitting in these Plazas, doing as it would seem the locals did, just sitting in the sun doing bugger all. We excused this as the best way to get the feel for a place, watching the people and the world go by. We visited the museum on the first day, apart from the fact that half of the exibhits had been nicked, this was still an experience. The museum had a rather large collection of mummys and deformed skulls. The dead mummys looked very life like still with hair, teeth and the grimace of death on their face. The next day we set off to Haucachina, a small resort in the middle of the desert, complete with a lagoon and palm trees, this was a proper oasis. Only took us about 20 mins in a taxi and we were sat next to the lagoon with drinks looking up at the massive sand dunes. We had come here to do sand surfing so we hired boards off a shifty looking local guy and hot footed it to the top of the massive sand dunes that surrounded the lagoon. We straped on to the boards and were surprised at how easy it was. We were soon sliding down the dunes. It was pretty tiring work walking back up though in the baking heat, and the sand caused a few friction issues, mainly after about 2 mins you would grind to a holt stuck in a load of sand. We think we will stick to the snow! We headed off back to Ica and our hotel to a feezing cold shower, nice! For the next 2 days we were finding sand everywhere!