Our second destination in the South was Ica. The city itself doesn’t really offer much to do or see, but in the nearby area you can find two popular things: Huacachina and a lot of vineyards!
The first thing we wanted to do was of course visit one of the vineyards! 🍷😁🍷
Time for grape juice
El Catador is a small winery with typical Peruvian wines and pisco. A guide showed us around and explained how they make the wines and pisco in old-fashioned way. After the harvest in February and March, they stomp the grapes barefoot. Visitors can even help stomping! 👣
After the tour we got a free tasting of their wines, which are typically for Peru very (very) sweet. We also got to try pisco with different tastes, like mango or Bailey’s-like cream liquors. For every shot we got, our guide told us different toasts in English or Spanish, which we had to repeat before drinking. 😄🍷 Of course it wasn’t enough wine for us! 😅
After all the wines and pisco we decided to have a late lunch at their restaurant. When leaving Christian accidentally forgot his hat, but didn’t realize it before we already were in a taxi heading back to Ica! We called the restaurant (which wasn’t that easy in Spanish!), made the taxidriver go back and luckily got the hat back! 🧢 Sadly the taxi ride got quite expensive with that detour, but nothing is more important then the Korn cap! 🤘
The desert
The next day we headed into the desert… 🏜️ About 5 km West of Ica you can find a tiny village which is a desert oasis: Huacachina.
In the center there is the lagoon with green water, which is said to be therapeutic. But that wasn’t the reason we came to visit the oasis. 😅 Surrounded by huge sand dunes the two most popular activities in Huacachina are dune buggy rides and sandboarding! Of course we had to try that! 🏂
We found Tony SandRider and planned the tour with him. This was really the best decision as there are a lot of tours where you get bad equipment and are surrounded by hundreds of tourists. With Tony we got real great sandboarding equipment and he showed us his secret spots!
The tour began with an amazing buggy ride over the huge sand dunes, which almost felt like riding a rollercoaster! 🎢 After arriving at the top of the first sand dune, Christian got his sandboard and Magda tried the bodyboarding.
While sandboarding is similar to snowboarding and pretty difficult, bodyboarding is laying on a shorter board and going down the dune headfirst! 🏂 Looking down the big dunes and Christian having a snowboard on the first time after 10 years was a weird feeling, but no turning back now! So Christian tried his best and even got some amazing 360 camera shots while doing it! The video is coming soon! 🎞😁
After the first dune we got into it and had much fun at the next few dunes. Two and a half hours later and sandy all over we got to the last high dune to see an awesome sunset! Only with our group lying in the sand and watching the sun go down was a great finish of this tour!
