““I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The buggy drove us through the Peruvian desert like a roller coaster ride, cascading in and out of the dunes.  I tried to video the ride with my camera but my body kept shaking from the impacts of the bumps.  We’d be driven to the top of a dune and get out of the buggy to ride face-first belly-down the steep slope.  There were grains of sand in every one of my orifices that day, but I couldn’t kick the adrenaline of both the buggy ride and the toboggan-like descent from the top.

We were given a moment of quiet pause to observe the sun setting over the dunes and the little oasis of Huacachina, often used as a getaway spot for residents of the neighbouring town of Ica.  Though the dunes echo daily with the shrieks of excited adrenaline-seekers, this is a place where it never rains or snows, where the landscape is silent and unmoving only until it is broken by desert winds.