Huacachina is the only natural desert oasis in South America, a palm-ringed lagoon in a dip among the dunes of the Ica desert, in southern Peru. Nothing feeds it. There is no river and no spring; the lagoon is the water table itself, showing through where the desert floor drops below it. That balance is thin. When farms nearby drilled wells and drew the table down the oasis nearly emptied, and the level is topped up by pumping now. People used to come here to get into it. Long before any buggy, Peruvians came to soak in the lagoon and the black mud along its edges, held to ease aches and skin complaints, and by the 1940s it was a fashionable spa with holiday homes around it. The name is Quechua, close to weeping woman. In the best-known telling a princess bathing here is surprised by a hunter; the mirror she drops spreads out into the lagoon, and her trailing robe becomes the dunes.
The day belongs to the sand now. Strapped into a buggy you go over the crests with the desert opening on every side, dropping down faces that fall away like walls. The late run ends on a tall crest as the light starts to go. You wax a board at the lip of the steepest slopes and ride it down toward the oasis. You stand on the gentler faces and go flat out headfirst on the rest, where the fine sand gives real speed. You climb the high dune behind the village on foot, a steep haul through soft sand, and from the top the oasis is green water, a ring of palms, desert running on past it as far as you see. Down in the shade, pedal boats go out onto the still olive-green water, walled off from the sand by the dunes on every side. Nobody gets into it any more. The water is turbid and thick with reeds, so the lagoon people once travelled to lie in is the thing everyone now climbs a dune to look down at.