So I said a sad farewell to all my little Arequipa friends and set off in a taxi with Jeffrey and Chris (Switzerland and South Africa) to the bus station (I did cry, but only a tiny bit!). At the bus station we also met Aimee, an English girl who'd been staying at the hostel for a while, and her friend Maria, so we all set off to Huacachina together!

Huacachina is basically an oasis with a small lake, surrounded by a ring of buildings, surrounded by giant sand dunes, in the middle of the desert! The main reason travellers go to Huacachina is to go sandboarding and dune buggying on the dunes! Sandboarding is pretty similar to snowboarding except obviously you're on sand dunes instead of snow, and I'm guessing you go a lot slower and there's more resistance from the sand, but I wouldn't know as I've never actually been snowboarding! Being able to snowboard does help with sandboarding though, as was proven by Jeffrey and Aimee, who could do turns down the dunes and everything, meaning they could also manage to maintain control, particularly on the big dunes. I was, however, another story!

They managed to teach me to start going down one way, and do ALMOST one trun, but I would always end up facing straight down and picking up more and more speed until I reached the bottom! Although credit to me I was very good at balancing as I speed down the dunes at a ridiculous speed, and hardly ever fell off! The others thought I was crazy though, as apparently most people who find themselves going faster and faster straight down just bail themselves to avoid hurting themselves further down! Oh well! I did decide no to try this technique on the huge enormous dunes for fear of getting so fast by the bottom that death or broken bones were inevitable, and instead opted for lying on my board face first, probably not much safer actually, but at least your closer to the ground!

The dune buggying was another story! Its pretty exhilarating being driven at high speed up and down really steep dunes in a vehicle with no sides and plastic seats with only a rollercoaster style seatbelt! The first trip was great, although we were mildly concerned about the banging noises coming from underneath our buggy, and the steam that seemed to be coming from the bonnet! We presumed anyway that this was pretty normal and nothing to worry about, and stopped for our sandboarding in a few different places. When we got round to leaving at around 5pm however, something appeared to be wrong with our buggy, it wouldn't start!

There were two other buggies in the group which was good news for us, although one of them just set off into the sunset without looking back! The other buggy attached a rope from its back to our front to jump start our buggy. At this point in time it was pretty much dark, and turned pitch black about 10 minutes into our journey. What then followed was a terrifying trip from the middle of the desert, up and down ridiculously steep sand dunes, with an engine that kept cutting out, brakes that didn't work at all (judging from the cut brake lines dangling down underneath the buggy they'd got broken at some point during the journey there!) and no lights, I'm guessing because the battery was low, which meant there was no way of judging the steepness or depth of the dunes! The other buggy tried to drive alongside and light our way with its headlights but this was only possible about half of the time!

The scariest part of the journey was definately when the engine cut out as we were just reaching the top of a big sand dune, a Peruvian guy who worked for the company shouted 'Oh s***!' and jumped out of the buggy and ran away, and me and Chris had our seatbelts off and were half way out of the buggy too when exactly what we assumed would happen did actually happen, the driver undid the handbrake, and the buggy rolled backwards all the way down the dune, in the darkness with the driver having absolutely no control! We finally made it to the last dunes, and Huacachina was visible just at the bottom (it did take us around an hour and a half to do a half an hour journey!) and the last hurdle to overcome, the massive dunes leading down to the town. We were slightly worried that we were gonna end up in the lake, but we managed to make it down using just the handbrake, whilst the people in the other buggy looked on and took photos and films of the people they were convinced were surely going to die!

We all cheered when we reached our hostel alive, and I have to say that terrifying experience (I've never shouted the words 'We're all gonna die aren't we? This is the end!' more times in my life!) didn't stop us going on the dune buggies again while we were there, although with a different company! I can also confirm that they didn't attempt to fix this buggy, as the next day when we saw them setting off for the trip, two buggies left quite happily, and one buggy sat in the same place for 10 minutes, and just wouldn't start...