Day 3—Saturday, July 2nd—Ica/Huacachina

huacachina
Originally uploaded by rswells.

I wrote about part of this day in a previous post and it proved to be the most low-key day of all. Tali and I did peep THE WAR OF THE WORLDS that afternoon, though; I liked it all right…right up until (SPOILER ALERT!!!) the very very end which I found to be straight trite and appallingly bourgeois. As the war played itself out and the entire theater seemed to talk and talk in not so hushed tones*, I ate and drank my “Combo Juvenil”: a medium pop (known in Perú as a “gaseosa”) whose lid served as the base for my popcorn box, which meant that the extra-long straw came all the way up through the popcorn.

Once back in Huacachina, I got ancy and attempted to scale one of the many surrounding sand dunes—I nearly shit myself because my stomach was so full of popcorn and coke. Tali was nice enough to fetch me some water and meet me back at the hostal once I took some deep breaths and burped and farted my way back down the dune, just like Charlie and Grandpa Joe had to when they drank too much soda and floated up too close to Mr. Wonka's menacing ceiling fan. We took it easy the rest of the night because we were getting up at 6.30 again the next morning with the lines of Nazca as the day’s destination to be.

*This tendency to disobey the “Silence is Golden” rule does not apply to all movie theaters here in Peru, but may indeed be an avatar of the Iqueños. Unfortunately, we were not able to test this hypothesis because the only other movies showing were BATMAN BEGINS (I’ve already seen it twice), yet another Denzel as a cop project, and THE PACIFIER starring Vin Diesel in a role once played by Hulk Hogan. No wonder ticket sales are down.