While Reality and Mangos Go Up In Smoke...

Huacachina. Even the name sounds exotic like some sort of spicy saucy seedy underworld accessible by manholes made of palm fronds and tunnels coated in silken scarves. While that's a bit of a stretch it is no less an exotic unexpected land and one in which you should dive deep in til it's ten feet over head. I digress...

Huacachina is a small cluster of homes and restaurants surrounding a palm-fringed lagoon that sits at the edge of a Sahara-like desert in southwest Peru. The oasis was formed when an ancient Incan Princess was caught bathing and fled from her onlookers. Her bathtub became the lagoon and her mantle, the surrounding sand dunes. So it goes.

After Machu Picchu this was an ultimate chill-out spot, with no real activities to speak of besides sand-boarding down the massive dunes, lazing by the pool and chatting up the smattering of international artisans who came, and stayed, and lazily peddle their wares. (This is me getting an ornate hair wrap and buying up more feather earrings than I'd care to admit.)

But there were other plans. On our dune buggy tour to go sand-boarding we discovered another mini-oasis nestled in between massive sand dunes, hidden from the outside world and devoid of humans. We were eager to fill that void. We hired the dune buggy driver as our personal desert taxi and after scrounging for some sleeping bags, bottles of water and simple foodstuffs we were dropped of at the little oasis just before sundown with plans to be picked up at 9 am.


A night alone under the stars in the silence of the desert seemed the perfect place to experience San Pedro, the hallucinogenic cactus native to Peru.

San Pedro grows all over Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile and is cultivated all over the world as an ornamental or medicinal plant. Green and phallic it grows in a clump of several stems, covered in spines warding off those who don't understand it. The active ingredient, so to speak, is mescaline although the mescaline which is illegal in the states has gone through a process of being extracted and processed. San Pedro has been used in traditional Andean medicine for over two thousand years and today to treat nervous conditions, drug addictions, joint problems, cardiac disease etc. It also is a powerful medicine of the mind.

We had picked up small bags filled with the green powder for about $5 a bag in Cusco from a local ''shaman,'' although I think he was more a knowledgeable hippie ex-pat than shaman. The bags contained the cactus which had been cut, sun-dried and powdered. San Pedro is a mild hallucinogen, on par with mushrooms, which is safe to take on your own, as opposed to stronger psychotropic drugs such as ayuahasca which requires the presence and guidance of a shaman.


As the sun lowered itself behind the dunes we drank the powder in a glass of water and a bit of juice to cut the bitterness. The taste wasn't horrible - kind of earthy - but the clumpy consistency was hard to swallow. In the pink fading light we explored our little oasis. A smattering of palm trees and mango trees offered us protecting from the expanse of the desert. Juicy ripe mangoes weighed down the branches and I was happy enough to take some of the weight off. Fruit - a perfect little package of food gifted to us from trees - is one of the greatest joys of South America.

We scavenged for dry wood and built up a beautiful fire. The effects of San Pedro came over me after a bit of a delay in a rush of energy that came in bursts through my body and exploded into giggles. I was very task oriented and gleefully prepared a meal since surprisingly we were all very hungry. Baked beans and bagels cooked over an open fire with tomatos and mangos for desert.

At first I was very intersted in the people who were sharing this experience. I wanted to share and communicate and sing along with the guitar and busy myself stoking the fire and collecting more mangos. I whittled a stick to make a spit and roast mangos to devour hot and sticky sweet. I made stick strucures in the fire which burned to reveal all sorts of firey imagery. But eventually I felt pulled to step back and Just Be.

My body buzzed in a very tranquil way and I lied down and became very aware of the physical world around me. The sand under my sleeping bag, the trees that are able to grow from some unseen water source, their dry branches that crackled away in the fire, delighting my ears with the sound. The wind as it played with the leaves of the trees and gently touched my cheeks, the stars as they became more pronounced in the darkened night sky. The rise of the moon and its slow and steady path as it moved across the sky. In this moment I felt like I understood my place in this massive crazy mash-up world. Not in any 'I know what I want to do with my life' kind of way but a reassurance that I was exactly where I belonged and just as the moon makes it journey I am on my own. I felt connected to the elements around me, as if I could almost see a thread that spreads from my fingertips, to the leaves of the tips of branches, that connect the the rays of light from the stars and on and on. I felt comforted to be a part of this web and I let it that comfort rock me into the darkness and lightness of sleep.