Huacachina is the kind of place that looks like a joke the Peruvian desert is playing on you. A small lagoon, ringed with palms and old-fashioned lamp posts, sits in a bowl of enormous sand dunes five kilometres from the city of Ica. Local legend says it formed when a princess, bathing, saw a hunter, dropped her mirror and fled; the mirror became the lake, and her robe the dunes. The truth is rather drier, a natural spring that has been dwindling for decades as water is pumped out for farms nearby.
Whatever the origin, the oasis is a Peruvian weekend favourite. Dune buggies roar over the crests, sandboarders slide down, and the little tourist village around the water has cafes, hostels and pisco bars. It is touristy and a little scruffy, but the dunes are the real thing: ridge after ridge of pale gold, rising over a hundred metres, and the light at sunset turns them copper and rose. A rider who has been down the Pan-American Highway all day will find the place a reasonable excuse to stop, and a sunset walk to the top of a dune is the sort of effort that justifies a cold beer.
Ica itself is a city of more than two hundred thousand people, and has everything: fuel at every junction, banks, markets, restaurants. It sits in a dry valley that is, strangely, wine country, and Ica is the home of Peruvian pisco, the grape brandy at the base of a pisco sour. Vineyards and small bodegas are scattered through the valley, and some welcome visitors for a tasting, though a motorcyclist should taste with a straw hat rather than a glass.
The ride in is easy. The Pan-American Highway runs south from Lima across the coastal desert with the Pacific to the west and the Andes foothills to the east, a long dry corridor of sand, scrub and occasional green river valleys. Wind is the thing to respect, particularly in the afternoon, when gusts blow sand across the tarmac and push a loaded bike around. Trucks are heavy on the main road, so be careful overtaking.
Sand creeps into everything here, so cover the bike's air intake and zip your luggage. In the cooler months the nights are chilly, and the coast is often shrouded in the grey garua mist, while Huacachina itself stays sunny and dry.