We've been in Huacachina near Ica in Peru now for a few days, soaking up the sun, lazing by the pool, sandboarding, dune-buggying and generally having some fun and relaxation. We took a bus up from Nasca to Ica (which only took a few hours) and, as we had been told Ica wasn't a particularly nice place, we promptly hopped in a taxi and left Ica for Huacachina an oasis town in the middle of the desert. It really is a tiny little oasis with really big sand dunes all the way around it!!

We've again got a really cheap place to stay and our hotel has a swimming pool which is a total bonus! A couple of days ago we decided to go on a dune-buggying tour. It was amazing fun scooting up and down huge dunes in a metal buggy. Some of the dunes were massive and driving down them it was almost vertical down!!! Really good fun though. Part of the buggying was to do some sandboarding too which was great fun. It was really hard to keep standing up though and even guys that had done plenty of snowboarding found it difficult too. By my third go though I did manage to go down a whole dune without falling off so I was pretty impressed with my effort!

After zooming over some more dunes in the buggy we came to some really really steep dunes where you had to lie flat on your stomach on the board to go down them. That was a lot of fun too but i totally scraped my arm on the second one and it really hurt!!! Lots of stinging. It´s kind of like a large carpet burn down my right forearm. Lots of sand in the scrape too didnt help and it wasnt until the day after that I finally managed to scrape the last of the sand out of my gash! Its healing up fine now though but its going to take a good week or so to heal I think. Unfortunately that kind of knocked my confidence to go down the last dune which was pretty much a vertical drop of about 100-200m. I didnt fancy scraping my arm any more. Kim did it though and it did look amazing! Perhaps if we come back I might give it a go next time!

Anyway, since our dune-buggying trip we have hired out our own boards and done a little bit of sandboarding ourselves. Climbing up dunes is a lot of hard work though. You spend about 40 minutes out of every hour climbing and the other 20 minutes on your backside as you tumble down the hills. It's a lot of fun though and we're thinking that we might spend our last week or so back in Huacachina doing some sandboarding, swimming and hopefully getting a nice tan to come home with!

Tomorrow we are heading back to Lima for a week to do some volunteering work at an orphanage in the suburbs. We're not quite sure what to expect but the website for the place is www.cimahope.org if you want to have a look where we're going.