Wine, Dunes, Sun, and Sand -- A Weekend Trip to Ica

Hola, amigos!

This past weekend, the CIEE group decided that we would embark on our first ever adventure outside of Lima by traveling 4 hours south to the coastal desert region in which lies Ica, Peru. We traveled south along the Panamerican Highway, passing through natural and man-made oases used for agriculture during the first 2 hours and barren, windswept desert during the last 2.

 

View from the bus of the countryside along the Panamerican Highway that runs from Ecuador, through Peru and down through Chile. 

Every so often, the brownish-grey dessert would be broken by little clusters of small but colorful clusters of houses. The houses often had tin sides and woven palm roofs and were accompanied by piles of rubble and abandoned buildings, and yet as we passed one little settlement, a crumbling wall had been whitewashed. In big blue letters facing the highway, the wall said in Spanish: "Welcome to Our Beautiful Home." Also dotted along the highway and most often painted on the ruined walls of abandoned buildings were political advertisements for Peruvian politicians who are running for mayor of the different districts and cities of Peru. Even in the remotest stretch of Peruvian coastal desert, we still saw the political signs, advertising to Peruvians and promising change and a future.

After our long and daunting bus ride, we finally arrived in the city of Ica at about noon on Friday. Ica is a fairly large city that sits between the deserted coast, towering sand dunes, and the foot of the impressive Andes mountains. We traveled for a short distance by taxi to an oasis resort town called Huacachina, a sleepy little lagoon settlement in the middle of the scorching Peruvian desert. We stayed at a cheap but very nice hostal called La Casa de Arena, or House of Sand. It sat at the base of a huge sand dune and had a very lovely pool and bar area for relaxing. After dumping our things in our rooms, we got ourselves organized and went out for lunch at one of the numerous inexpensive restaurants facing the lagoon. With our stomachs full and filled with new energy from the bright sunshine (which we had not seen for over a month in Lima) we set out to book ourselves a wine tour from three of the best bodegas in the surrounding area. 

Colorful boats on the Huacachina lagoon

A view of Huacachina from the surrounding desert. 

The first bodega we went to was called Tacama and was built in the 16th century, formerly a monastery. We took a tour out in the grape fields while the guide explained to us that they grow three different types of grapes: for wine, for pisco, and for eating. The buildings of the vineyard were a cheerful pink and numerous planted flowers added to the overly romanticized feeling of the place. The tour guide took us into the production building where she explained that they received a mechanized bottler machine from France in 2008 which reduced the vineyard workforce from 100 down to a mere 12. After the tour, we were invited inside to try several different types of wine and pisco. The wines were sweet, dry, and semi-dry, and the pisco was strong and powerful.

The vineyards of Tacama with the impressive sweep of the Andes mountains in the distance. 

After the majestic beauty of Tacama, we traveled to two smaller wineries on the borders of Ica itself. These wineries were different because they were woven seamlessly into the city, unlike the remote beauty of Tacama. I have to admit I do not remember the names of these wineries, but I will describe them. The first one we went to was interesting because they had preserved the century-old machinery for pressing grapes and making wine. We explored the ingenious engineering of the time, including a system of heater and pipes that would be used to distill the fermented vapor from the grapes to produce the famous clear and powerful pisco brandy. After the tour, we sampled more wine and pisco, and then piled into the taxis for the journey to our final winery of the day.

The last winery was a combination of winery and museum. It was located in this underground dug out where clay casks of wine stood shoulder to shoulder underneath walls and a ceiling that were heaped and hung with artifacts and relics from the pre-Hispanic cultures in Ica and Nazca. Our taxi driver gave us the tour of the bodega himself, dipping a long bamboo rod into the clay casks of wine in order for us to try it. This bodega held some of the strongest wines we had yet to try. Our guide jokingly called one wine the "Baby-Making Wine" because he said that women who drink it while out partying find themselves in a predicament 9 months down the road. At one point, I drifted away from the rest of the group with my second little cup of sweet red wine to explore the antiques lining the walls. Our guide, ever helpful, explained to me that the owner of the bodega was apparently a living descendant of San Martin, the Peruvian hero of independence. He also showed me several Inca artifacts which he insisted were authentic as well as dried, yellowing skulls which were also apparently relics from the pre-Hispanic days of headhunting and trophy collecting. 

The winery that was also a museum. The clay pots are used to store the wine after it has been produced. You can see the wine spillage on the one in the bottom right corner; this is the one we drank out of.

Our guide teaching us how to pull the wine from the pot. He grew up in a Quechua speaking family in the Andes mountains and moved to the coast about 30 years ago, around the time that terrorism was running rampant in the mountains. I asked him if it was hard to make the transition from the mountains to the desert. He replied, "Maybe at first. But after so long, I don't even notice. I was born in the mountains, but now I live here. I have wine running through one vein and pisco in the other." 

Our tour of the wineries was an amazing experience as each one was different than the last and showed a different aspect of Ica culture that is so dependent on the production of wine.

Saturday morning marked the start of a new adventure. Our little group decided to take advantage of the sun and beautiful weather by journeying 40 minutes west to the Pacific coastal town of Paracas. The islands off the coast of Paracas are famous for their wildlife (including penguins!) and have been compared to the natural beauty of the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. We did not go to the islands, but were content to pass the day on the beach, drinking in the sun and enjoying the coastal climate. Because of its obvious proximity to the sea, the restaurants of Paracas have menus filled with seafood options, and since there are so many restaurants in any given street, the owners compete with each other to get large groups of people to pick their establishment over the others.

Dozens of boats sit in the water to take tourists out to the island nature reserves, and the skies are thick with seagulls and pelicans, dive-bombing the fish-filled sea.

The pelicans were unafraid of people, and so I was able to get very close without having them fly off!

Our morning in Paracas was beautiful, and we managed to pack up and leave in the early afternoon, right before crowds of tourists from the city showed up to clog up the beaches and the restaurants. The taxis took us back to Huacachina where we had just enough time to relax by the pool before the start of our next activity: dune exploration. 

Our hostal organized dune buggy expeditions for a small fee starting at 4 p.m. Our whole group piled into a dune buggy -- which was basically a jeep but a lot bigger and with a huge metal frame -- and we thundered out of Huacachina and into the desert sands. The dune buggy can go a lot faster than it looks, and when you hit a dune at 35 miles and hour, the jolting jerking ride is almost as good as any roller coaster. A few times our driver stopped so that we could pile out and take pictures. Then, we came to a screeching halt at the top of one of the highest dunes yet so that we can go sand boarding. 

Sand boarding is exactly like it sounds: the same concept as snowboarding but with a lot less cold and fluffy sand to land on instead of cold, unforgiving, icy snow. Our dune buggy driver snapped a wax candle into pieces so that we could wax the bottoms of our boards, and then he showed us how to position our weight and lay on our stomachs so that we could go whizzing down the dune face first at surprising speed. Some of the more adventurous of our group actually rode the boards standing up, but the rest of us played it safe and emerged mostly unscathed on the other side. We got to slide down and hike up a total of 6 dunes, and it was such a unique experience to be doing something exhilarating and fun without caring that you were coming away with sand literally everywhere. We ended up having to hike up a dune ridge to get back to where the dune buggies were waiting for us, so by the time we had all piled back in, we were too late to see the sunset over the sand dunes. However, we did get a chance to stop atop a dune looking down at Huacachina, and a desert at sunset is still one of the most beautiful sights to behold. 

The dune buggy that took us out into the desert. 

My sandboard. Sandboarding is surprisingly more difficult than it seems, because if your weight is not exactly right on the board, your board will just sink in the sand leaving you sitting foolishly on the side of the dune with nowhere to go.

The whole CIEE group after our dune and sandboarding expedition. You can see Huacachina behind us and the towering sand dunes behind that. 

After we returned from our sand dune expedition, we went out to eat at a nice little place in town that made pizza, and then returned to our hostal for drinks and conversation by the pool. Past midnight, a friend and I decided to climb the giant sand dune behind our building to get a magnificent view of the stars and the countryside. It took over an hour to get to the top, but as we sat on the ridge at the top of the highest dune, we could see the entirety of Ica, the mountains off to one side, and the desert off to the other. It was humbling to have completed a climb like that and to be able to see the mark of civilization on the desert and hear the echoes of music of the people who had made this place their home.