Our sandboards stood like picket fence posts along the disintegrating concrete wall. My long accompaniment with Andean ridges had been replaced by mountains of fine, wind-washed sand. These monoliths loomed over the oasis town of Huacachina like sentinels. An eternal wave break, the mountains of sand stood cresting to topple into the city, suffocating it.

Huacachina, a town forgotten by many guide books, sits hidden behind giant sand dunes. The dunes tower so high that they bring sunset to the town an hour earlier. A manufactured oasis that grows hotels, hostels, and restaurants, whose roots run deep within the lake, whose livelihood depends on this faux oasis and the draw of the dunes.

Giant mountains of sand. A seabed whose water has long left. Question: how can you turn sand into food, clothing, and shelter? Answer: conquer it on a board.

Like picking a profitable stock, we chose our sand boards from the many that stood fraying before us. Making our decisions based on the certain color markings on the wood, or the contour of a certain edge, we ignorantly chose. Very slight aesthetic variations to duplicate molds of the same board. We didn’t know the front end from the back of these pieces of wood. We chose them from an armory of sand boards whose ability and knowledge of how one worked was foreign to us. This one’s pretty, we thought, and took it for the best of the lot.

Always one for efficiency, I chose the board closest to me. I picked it up as if it was a creature I had found dead on the road side. I turned it over in my hands wondering about the mechanics of a piece of wood shaped like a snow board, whose ends tapered slightly up from dramatic creases in the wood. The top of the board was unfinished wood akin to balsa. (I deduced it was the top from the straps that were braided onto it. Sherlock Holmes I’m not, but neither am I daft). I noticed some boards still had whole knots embedded in them. It appeared as if they had been schluffed from a tree that lost its wood like a python loses its skin, one sheet at a time. Once collected from whatever tree produced them, all that was required was a very quick run with a piece of sand paper to remove the branches that may have still clung to them, and a glued on piece of Formica attached to its belly to reduce the friction. Thus was completed the excaliber that would conquer the steep sliding sands of the dunes.

I carried my board like school books, under one arm. Others grabbed it by the straps and let the board dangle like a doll being toted by a toddler holding onto only its stuffed leg. Waiting for us was a do-it-yourself dune buggy, painted in Rasta colors of red, gold, black and green. It appeared to at one time have been a Ford Bronco Custom whose entire body and interior had either disintegrated or been deemed unfit for sand travel, and thus completely removed. In its place were braced metal pipes, soldered together in a way that outlined the shadow shape of the truck in strong skeletal lines. Interlaced within these metal barriers were three bench seats whose torn orange plastic covering adequately complimented the paint job. There was no hood, no seat belts, no windshield, and no way I was going to miss out on climbing to the top of the dunes on a leftover vehicle from Mel Gibson’s "Mad Max" movies. We all threw our boards into the netted trunk of the buggy and slipped between the bracing bars as gracefully as we could, taking our seats on the cushiony orange seats of our post-apocalyptic chariot.

Our driver turned the ignition and the Franken-Ford roared to life, no key was required, just a turn of the key slot. We let the monster grumble about being woken up for a few minutes, letting it adjust to its surroundings as gasoline coursed through its heart. The lion’s roar of the engine turned to a steady growl, and our driver coerced it forward by forcing gasoline down its gullet.

We picked up speed quickly and barreled down the sand-covered asphalt toward the town’s largest dune. After only thirty seconds, we were faced with the frozen wave, losing and rebuilding itself with each breath of wind. We circled around it searching for a channel. We rose quickly up the shortened face of an encountered sand channel and followed the tire-treaded markings of dune buggies before us. We rode the sand swells deep into the dunes until the town of Huacachina lay on shore beyond towering dunes that obscured our sight from its existence. We were surrounded by sand whose fine bodies threw themselves about under our deeply treaded rubber tires. Slight licks of wind caught loose grains in their sighs and pushed them running along the wind wrinkled ground. Small ripples, like wind kissed water in a tide pool, etched themselves onto the top layers of the pulverized rock. The beast we rode on became more daring, carrying us up steep faces that seemed more like walls than angled inclines. I looked to our driver, handling the beast without a smile, sunglasses pushed hard against his face, and his left arm resting on a metal beam that stood in remembrance of the door. I looked to the control panel. Speedometer: stuck at zero, not even a hair’s width of an increase. RPM’s: they bounced along with the terrain of the dunes. Occasionally they bounced into the red, other times they stood as silent and stoic as the driver himself. I then noticed the buggy was driving in "park." I had seen the driver fiddle with the steering wheel mounted gear shift of the automatic, but the panel always read "park." I removed my attention from the endless rise, fall, and flat-out within the dunes, and focused on his shifting. When we approached a dune he would jerk the gear shift down, no movement on the panel, but the engine would rumble quicker. When we crested the dune he would jerk the gear shift north, still no change in the panel. With their deconstruction of what had been a Ford Bronco, they had apparently connected the choke to the gear shift. Drive, first, second, neutral, they had all been forsaken for gas, more gas, and even more gas, all with a pull of the shaft.

As we continued our roller coaster ride through the early morning dunes our hovering morning clouds began to disperse. I felt slight tickles of water hitting me lightly on the cheek and lips. At times, when I would shout something to Virgil, a New Yorker who shared the front bench seat with me and the driver, the drops would find their way into my open mouth. Was rain falling? Would our trip be detoured by muddied sand? Riding where the front passenger seat would have been, I stuck my arm out of the encasing and felt for more drops. None fell on my hand, but my face was still being reminded of their presence. Right then I figured it out. I shut my mouth tight and made sure my sunglasses fit smartly against my face. Now I knew why the driver never smiled and never talked. Protruding from the hoodless engine in front of me stood two exhaust pipes. Although I’m sure carbon monoxide was churning out of the black rods quicker than at a NASCAR race, our open canopy and constant speed blew most of it away from our lungs. However, condensation from a hot engine and cool moving air hung at the mouth of the exhaust. When the droplets became heavy enough they would free themselves from the lip they clung to, and find their way onto mine. Exhaust water had been pelting my face like pixie slaps. I tried hurriedly to remember if I had welcomed any into my mouth, thinking they were rain drops. I couldn’t be sure of whether I had or not, but I was damned sure I wouldn’t start now. I rode the rest of the way as outwardly calm as the driver. My stomach rose and sank with the dunes we left behind us, but all I would allow myself was an extremely tight lipped smile.

When the engine stopped we found ourselves at the top of one of the dunes. Our instructor, who had been riding with us, produced a bag of floor wax and gave each of us two squirts on the slick side of our boards. He told us to spread the wax over the surface of the board with out hands. What he didn’t tell us until I asked was that the wax wouldn’t come out of our clothes. As if we were the Rockettes, everyone stopped spreading the orange juice concentrate-looking wax simultaneously and looked to their shirts and pants. Too late, we had all unknowingly stained some section of our clothing. I asked for more wax so I could at least make my once white shirt uniformly orange, but was given only giggles in its place.

Once we had waxed our boards and wiped the excess from our hand and on the dunes, we sat in a line along the sand dunes ridge, listening intently on how not to simply fall head over ass down the face of the fixed wave. "Strong foot like dis!" Shouted our instructor as he faced the sand wall and headed down the dune at a forty-five degree angle. A few yards down he yelled back up at us, "to stop you do dis!" He turned his board parallel with the dune and leaned into the wall with his knees. After looking up at us one last time he goaded us and said, "ok, leets go!" With that last bout of confidence directed at us stranded gringos, he cut a swath down the dune side spouting sand from the back of the board as he went. We all looked at each other for a second, strapped our feet in tight to the velcro bindings, and looked down the steep face. We smiled and shrugged as we pushed off and tried to steady ourselves on our floor waxed boards. Most of us stumbled more than once, inviting sand into body crevasses and clothing hems that we once thought sacred. I made it half way down with little difficulty, then found the achilles’ heel of this sport. Floor wax was not meant to be slathered onto the bottom of a wooded board like sunscreen, then scraped off in deep and finely grained sand. Half way down the slope, our boards lost all the slickness that protected them from the fun-hindering traction. I hopped down the mountain hoping my weight would give my board momentum so I could coast the rest of the way down. It was not to be. I stopped my crazed hopping and unstrapped myself from the board. I ran down the rest of the face. I looked back up the dune and saw most of our group still flopping on their backs, bellies, and butts as they eked down the side. Eventually they too unstrapped themselves, held onto their boards, and walked the rest of the way.

We went to five more dunes, each time throwing our boards into the back of the beast and rumbling to the top. With each descent I felt more comfortable on the board. I sped up my run and ran out of wax closer and closer to the bottom. I learned that speed is not just a way to test your testosterone on the side of a sand dune, it is also necessary if you plan on getting down without walking.

By the end of the day, sand had replaced the skin on our scalps and the gums between our teeth. I ran my fingers through my hair and scratching my head found my fingernails filled with sand that had taken up residence. Our gritty smiles crunched under our words as we laughed and talked about our runs. On the ride back to our hostel however, as everyone in the back of the dune buggy conversed in competing amplification with the engine, my companions in the front seat smiled tight lipped smiles, feeling the sting of exhaust water on our faces, and hoping we would have a chance to do it all again.