Weekly Photo Challenge: Down
Day 196 – February 3, 2012
The latest theme for the Weekly Photo Challenge from WordPress is Down.
The photo:
A gritty ride
The background:
The family, with my visiting suegra (Spanish for “mother-in-law”), took a weekend trip to the towns of Ica and Paracas, which is a lovely three-hour ride heading south from Lima on the Pan-American Highway.
Our first stop was near Ica, at a place called Laguna Huacachina. This is an oasis that is surrounded by massive sand dunes. One of the activities that can be done is to rent a driver who will take you out in his dune buggy and give you a ninety-minute heart-stopping thrill ride up, down, sideways, and backwards across the dunes that comprise this desolate and sandy landscape. It’s like a roller coaster, but without knowing where the track is…and half the time, I don’t think the driver did either.
In addition to that gasoline-fueled ride, our driver stopped five times and offered us the chance to ride sandboards down the sloped dunes. With the exception of mi suegra, all of us partook of this new experience.
The photo you see above has my daughter in the center just as she starts her first ride of the day. You can’t hear her squeals in this snapshot, but they are there. The dot at the right is my lovely wife at the end of her initial run. The perspective, I believe, gives you a sense of the distance my daughter has ahead of her. The man on the left was our driver who, yes, drives a dune buggy barefoot.
Posted on February 17, 2012, in Difference, Peru and tagged Laguna Huacachina, Peru, photography, postaday, sand dunes, sandboarding, travel. Bookmark the permalink. 24 Comments.
Down the Sand Downs (heehee)
Here’s my entry at:
https://fstopfantasy.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/weekly-photo-challenge-down-meal-time/
And if we had down pillows to stop our slide it would have been “Down the Sand Downs Onto Down”.
Uh, we should stop before this gets out of hand.
funny – we have a place you can do that here in NZ too
Sign us up. We had such a good time doing this, I can see attempting it again at another site south of the Equator.
What a memorable time! It sounds like a blast!
It was fun and the sunset over the dunes at the end was a great topper to the evening.
Love your idea!
Thank you muchly for the kind compliment and thanks for stopping by.
That looks like fun.
It most indeed was fun and the fact that the whole family was able to participate made it that much more special.
Wow! That looks amazing but I’d be worried about ‘eating’ it on the way down!
As I can tell you from experience, when we went down on our stomach (as pictured), no one “ate” it. There was only time when I went down standing up (as a real boarder should go) that I fell down, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as you might imagine…although I was picking sand out of my pockets for a day or two afterwards.
fun going down
http://amarnaik.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/weekly-photo-challenge-down/
…and a workout-and-a-half climbing back up the hill…which I only tried once. After that breath-taking experience (literally…I was gasping for air), I waited for the dune buggy to come down and pick us up every other time.
Wonderful for the this week’s theme!
Thanks for the wonderful comment. I appreciate you stopping by.
whee! love how you can see the woman at the end of the slide!
I do too (and I love her also as she is my lovely wife) and I think it does a good job in showing how far we had to slide on that run. That was our first run and each one became progressively longer.
nice picture…..
Thanks. Glad you clicked the link and stopped on by.
Pingback: A Rocky Road « Sin Polaris
Pingback: Photo Friday: Downward « Sin Polaris
Pingback: Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary « Sin Polaris
Pingback: Photo Friday: Reflected « Sin Polaris