From Lima we took the bus a couple hours down the road to Huacachina and Nasca. A lot of people make these stops for a day, arriving by bus, doing the tour, staying the night and on to the next stop. But
Huacachina is a desert oasis just outside of Ica. The oasis itself is fairly small, probably only 300 meters by 100 meters, but it is surrounded by the iconic palm trees, and is well supplied with hotels, guest houses and restaurants to serve all of the visitors. A lot of people make this a 1 day stop, but we prefer to travel a bit slower so we booked a couple nights and enjoy a more relaxed pace.
The main activity here is dune buggy riding and sandboarding. We had a 2 hour sunset tour, they take you around on the dune buggy and you get a chance to board down 3 dunes and then stop to watch the sunset before returning. The ride is fun, at moments its like riding a roller coaster, though I think we had a lame driver as the fun moments were few, while it appeared others around us were going much faster and over much interesting terrain. The boarding was also fun, but unfortunately the boards they bring along are not really for standing up on, the driver didn’t want to stand up on board, so we rode them down face first. The sunset from the top of a dune was the best part, as we were able to sit alone for a bit and watch the spectacular sunset.
Earlier in the day we did a wine and Pisco tour. We visited the tTacama winery that was more of an industrial producer and El Catador that was more artesenal. The Tacama tour was your standard winery tour, not too much out of the ordinary, touring the wine making facilities followed by a tasting. Learning a bit about the Pisco making process was new to us and quite interesting. The wines were okay, probably not one I would buy in the store, the pisco was a strong and not a strong flavor, I do enjoy Pisco sours, but drinking straight is not something I would do in the future. The hacienda was the best part of the tour as originally it was a monastery that was abandoned after the earthquake, but the grounds had been nicely restored. Here is one of the original presses.
El Catador was a much better tour, we were assigned a personal guide that walked us through the process, while they were somewhat modernized, they had a lot of the old equipment around and showed us how it was originally produced using foot stamping and in clay jars. Also the concrete stills were not like any I had seen before. And the tasting at the end was much better, the sweet wines were definitely not to my tastes, nor was the straight pisco. However they gave us a tasting for many different preparations, one was a “sour” preparation where the pisco was mixed with different juices to produce a pre made pisco sour, or something similar with different fruit flavors. Our favorite was the passion fruit. The other preparation was a crema, pisco mixed with fruit flavors and cream, they tasted like liquid ice cream, absolutely delicious. Our favorite was peach. We enjoyed the preparations so much we bought a bottle of each of our favorites to enjoy during the rest of our time in Peru.
