Sandboarding in Peru
Question: How can you turn sand into food, clothing, and shelter? Answer: Conquer it on a board.

By John Daters - Huacachina, a town forgotten by many guidebooks, sits hidden behind giant sand dunes. The dunes tower so high that they bring sunset to the town an hour early. It is a manufactured oasis that grows hotels, hostels, and restaurants, whose roots run deep within the lake, whose livelihood depends on this faux oasis and the draw of the dunes.

Our sandboards stood like picket fence posts along the disintegrating concrete wall. My long accompaniment with Andean ridges had been replaced by mountains of fine, wind-washed sand. These monoliths loomed over the oasis town of Huacachina like sentinels. An eternal wave break, the mountains of sand stood cresting to topple into the city, suffocating it.

Like picking a profitable stock, we chose our sandboards from the many that stood fraying before us. "This one’s pretty," we thought, and took it for the best of the lot. Always one for efficiency, I chose the board closest to me and picked it up as if it were roadkill. I turned it over in my hands wondering about the mechanics of it and carried my board like schoolbooks under one arm.

Others grabbed it by the straps, dangling it like a doll toted by a toddler holding onto only its stuffed leg. Waiting for us was a do-it-yourself dune buggy, painted in Rasta colors of red, gold, black and green. It appeared to have been a Ford Bronco Custom once, whose entire body and interior must have disintegrated and been completely removed.

In its place were braced metal pipes, soldered together in a way that outlined the shadow shape of the truck in strong skeletal lines. Interlaced within these metal barriers were three bench seats whose torn orange plastic covering adequately complimented the paint job. There was no hood, no seatbelts, no windshield, and no way I was going to miss out on climbing the dunes on a leftover vehicle from Mel Gibson’s "Mad Max" movies. We threw our boards into the netted trunk of the buggy and slipped between the bracing bars and planted ourselves on the cushiony orange seats of our post-apocalyptic chariot.

Our driver turned on the ignition and the Franken-Ford roared to life without a key, just a turn of the key slot. We let the monster grumble for a few minutes, as gasoline coursed through its heart. The lion’s roar of the engine turned to a steady growl, and our driver coerced it forward by forcing gasoline down its gullet.

We picked up speed quickly and barreled down the sand-covered asphalt toward the town’s largest dune. After only thirty seconds, we were faced with the frozen wave, losing and rebuilding itself with each breath of wind. We circled around it searching for a channel. We rose quickly up the shortened face of an encountered sand channel and followed the tire-treaded markings of dune buggies before us. We rode the sand swells deep into the dunes until the town of Huacachina lay on shore beyond towering dunes that obscured our sight. We were surrounded by sand whose fine bodies threw themselves about under our deeply treaded rubber tires. Slight licks of wind caught loose grains in their sighs and pushed them running along the wind-wrinkled ground. Small ripples, like wind-kissed water in a tide pool, etched themselves onto the top layers of the pulverized rock.

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