Went on a tour with Peru Hop to visit Ballestas Island, which is referred to as the “poor man’s Galapagos.”  I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but after having done it, it definitely is the poor man’s version.  It was basically a boat ride out to a big cliff that had a lot of seagulls, some sea lions, and penguins.  The best part was probably the penguins, but we only passed by the penguins and didn’t get to observe them for long.  It was mainly a lot of birds and a bird poo mountain.

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After the Ballestas Island, we were on our way to Huacachina to dune buggy and sand board!  We had some time to explore the town and walked around the little oasis area.  I’m glad we only took a day trip here, as it literally took us 15 minutes to walk around the whole town.  We even made a little video touring the town!

Off to dune buggying and sandboarding!  It was super fun (kind of scary at times), and would definitely recommend taking a day trip out to do it.  It was really beautiful to look out over the sand dunes and see the skyline while sandboarding

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For some reason Minh decided to throw the gopro down one of the dunes thinking it would slide all the way down the hill…? He tried to grab it going down the dune and missed it, so I had to make sure I grabbed it on my way down. I managed to snag it, and then totally ate it when I hit the bottom of the dune. Sand all down my shirt, jacket, pants – sand everywhere! I got a round of applause from everyone at the bottom for my successful rescue of the gopro though. Later on, while we were dunebuggying down a really steep hill, I felt something hit my foot, I look down and see Minh’s iphone by my feet (he was sitting in the row behind me, diagonally across from me). Because we were going down really rough terrain and couldn’t release my seatbelt to bend over to grab the phone, I had to concentrate on keeping the phone between my feet so that it wouldn’t fly out of the buggy, without actually stomping and breaking his phone. When we finally stopped, I picked up the phone and called out to Minh. He had a big look of relief as he says he was worried about where his phone was the whole time we were going down the hill as well. I saved the day again, Minh’s so lucky to have me (haha!) =P

Here’s another video we put together of our dune-buggy adventure:

After we were done sandboarding, they took us to watch the sunset which was really nice after all the exciting activitiy.

I would definitely recommend checking out Huacachina, it offers some fun, adventurous activity with beautiful landscape as well…but I would skip the Ballestas Island portion.