Travel

If I had driven through Pisco without sampling the liquor that bears the region’s name, I’d never be able to show my face again.  Obviously, a stop at a pisco winery was in order.

Dating back to the 1500s, Pisco actually gets its name from the condom-shaped pot in which it was traditionally aged. The Quechua people called this pottery “piscu,” which means “little bird.”

Nowadays pisco is made in gigantic plastic barrels, but the wineries keep these pots around just for fun. Sometimes they rent them out to people who still want to make liquor the old-timey way.

There’s a big, stone room where grapes are smashed beneath a gigantic wood squasher thingy. (Yes, that’s the official name.) I asked a man at the winery what would happen if I jumped underneath the squasher. He said as long as I was really drunk first, I’d make some high-quality wine.

After the grapes are smooshed, the liquid goes through a little canal, where the pisco pots are filled.

It has to sit open for a week to let all the nasty gases escape. Then the pots are sealed with a layer of leaves, followed by a layer of clay.

They carry the pots using this “wooden donkey.” It’s pretty damn heavy, if you’re curious.

There’s more: The pisco is fermented, heated by copper coils, put through more channels, condensed, filtered and tested for quality by a “drunk-o-meter” — a very happy, but sloppy drunk man, according to my tour guide at the winery — and aged.

Then some more stuff happens, a pisco fairy waves her magic wand and … er, I don’t know. Remember, I was testing pisco while they taught me about the process!

The liquor tastes vaguely like grappa, and it’s incredibly smooth. The Husband seems to like it best in a pisco sour, the national cocktail of Peru, made with pisco, lemon or lime juice, egg whites, simple syrup and bitters.

As for myself, I’ve been enjoying chilcano de pisco. It goes a little something like this:

4 oz. ginger ale

2 oz. pisco

1/2 lime

Fill an 8 oz. tumbler with ice cubes. Pour the pisco over ice. Squeeze the lime into the glass. Fill with ginger ale and stir.

The place: Huacachina, Peru

The scene: A crazy dune buggy driver yelling, “Arriba! Arriba!” as we practically took flight over the enormous mountains of sand.

When we arrived at one of the highest mounds, the buggy driver handed us each a snowboard, which he then slathered with a fat fist full of wax.

“Go,” he said.

But how?

“Down.”

I hit the dunes sled-style, with my stomach on the board. I didn’t look as extreme as the other sandboarders around me — but then again, I’m not auditioning for a Mountain Dew commercial or anything.

Besides, I was tearing it up faster than anyone who stood up on the board. So fast you can’t even see me in the photo below!

After about an hour or so — sand plastered to my lipgloss, sand in my socks, sand in my you-don’t-want-to-know — it was time to move on.

“Arriba! Arriba!” yelled the driver from the front seat of the dune buggy.

The whole situation seemed kind of shady.

The Husband and I signed up with a tour that would take us by bus to Paracas Bay, where we would be met by a driver to take us to our hostel, then continue the tour the following day.

Except the bus dropped us off at a shack made of sand and straw. There was nobody there to meet us. A couple of random people spoke fast Spanish and tiptoed around us.

Within a few minutes the entire place was empty. The air was cooling off fast, and soon night would come.

Eventually a woman showed up pointed to us and ushered us into a van. “You go here,” she demanded. Two other people jumped in the van, and we took off.

The Husband shot me a knowing look, then slipped the knife out of his pocket and concealed it in his palm. I was visibly shaking.

The van crawled to a stop at the end of a sandy road on the beach — in front of a stunning hotel. The driver said, “Ta-da!”

This is where we ended up staying for the night.

This was the view from our balcony.

The room was sweet and simple and quite luxurious compared to our $8 a night hostels.

We ended the day hand in hand, walking along the beach, like some sort of “Love Songs of the ’60s” commercial.

The next day the tour guide met us as planned, and all was well.