Sandboarding in Huacachina, Peru

We arrived in Huacachina at night, and didn't see the massive wall of sand dunes that the small town is famous for. When we woke up in the morning and had a look outside we realised we were in a small oasis in the middle of a sand desert, with mountains and mountains of sand surrounding us.

The reason most people stay in Huacachina is for the sandboarding. First you get on a sandbuggy along with about 10 other people, and the surly driver takes you speeding and bumping over the dunes before stopping at certain spots and grunting one word prompts - 'photo', or 'boarding'. With no more information besides that, you pile out and take photos or grab a board from the back of the buggy. The driver hands you a piece of wax candle to wax up your board then grabs it off you and waxes it more if he thinks you haven't done a sufficient job.

We arrived at the first small hill, and our driver/guide stood in front of us. "You can go standing up", he said, "or lying down. Lying down is good, go real fast. Who wants to go first?"

We took turns sliding down the dune. It was pretty easy. Once we were done he instructed us to walk to the next one and pointed in the general direction of it.
The second hill was much the same as the first, maybe slightly steeper. I assumed, naively, that the third hill would be a small step up again. We piled back in the buggy and the driver/guide zoomed erratically over the dunes in a seemingly random direction to the third dune. We got out.

"Walk up there", the driver said. He pointed. We walked. We came to the edge of the dune. We peered over the edge, to what was an almost vertical drop about a hundred and fifty metres below us.

A couple of people shrugged and just went for it. Claire started to sit on her board. He reached his hand out:

"No!" he barked. "Do that way, go to hospital!"

From the way he said this, I was quite sure he would have seen people go to hospital before. Probably every time he takes people to the dunes, in fact. He looked away, then mumbled something about death. I just stared at him.

We decided to walk down the edge of the dune and started to head off, but before we left one girl came forward. She lay down on her board in the way he'd shown us, belly down, facing the front. "I feel like my head is going to hit the front of this board' she said uneasily.

The guide pulled her forward and pushed her, speeding, down the dune. About half way down she lost her grip, smacked her head on the front of the board and started tumbling down the dune, limbs flailing, until she skidded to a halt at the bottom.

We watched in horror. Our guide, on the other hand, didn't seem surprised. It was almost as if he was waiting for something to go wrong, and he didn't even go down to check if she was okay. "She didn't open her legs wide enough" he said dismissively.

When we reached the bottom of the dune, on foot, we saw the girl for the first time after she'd fallen off. She'd scraped the skin off her face and looked pale and badly shaken up. We all piled somberly back into the dune buggy and drove back to Huacachina.
Nicola