PERU · SOUTH AMERICA
The Andes, the Amazon, and the road to Machu Picchu.
Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail, Cusco and the Sacred Valley, Lima's kitchens, Lake Titicaca, the Nazca lines and the Amazon. The trips worth your time, the length of the country.
Only in Peru
The Inca Trail, a rainbow mountain, lines in the sand.
Plenty of countries have mountains, ruins and desert. Peru stacks them like nowhere else: an Inca road to a cloud-forest citadel, a ridge above 5,000 metres striped like a paint chart, and giant figures you can only read from a plane.
The Inca Trail
Arrive through the Sun Gate.
The classic trek follows an original Inca road over three high passes and reaches Machu Picchu on foot at dawn, through Intipunku, the Sun Gate. Nowhere else on earth do you walk into a ruin the way its builders intended. Permits are capped and go months ahead.
- 1 From Cusco: Full-Day Group Tour of Machu Picchu
- 2 Machu Picchu Day Trip from Cusco
- 3 Machu Picchu: Full-Day Tour from Cusco with Optional Lunch
Vinicunca
A mountain striped like minerals.
Vinicunca rises to 5,200 metres in bands of red, gold, turquoise and lavender, mineral layers left exposed as the glacier above them retreated. The climb is short but the altitude is real, and the ridgeline looks like nothing else in the Andes.
- 1 From Cusco: Vinicunca Rainbow Mountain ATV Tour with Meals
- 2 From Cusco: Excursion to Humantay lake from Cusco
- 3 From Arequipa: Sillar Route Trek
The Nazca Lines
Drawings only a pilot can read.
Etched into the coastal desert two thousand years ago, the hummingbird, the monkey and the spider are so large they only resolve from the air. A light aircraft banks over each one in turn. How a culture drew them without ever seeing them whole is still an open question.
- 1 From Nazca: 35-Minute Flight Over Nazca Lines
- 2 Lima: Ballestas & Huacachina Day Trip w/ Nazca Lines Flight
- 3 Private Tour to the Astonished Nazca Lines and Huacachina Oasis
Plan the trip
How many days have you got?
Peru rewards a little planning. Three routes that actually work, sized to the time you have, from a few days in the Andes to the whole country coast to jungle.
Start here
If you only book one thing.
The single experience travellers book more than any other in Peru. If your trip needs an anchor, this is a safe place to begin.
The classics
Peru's Most Popular Tours
Machu Picchu, Rainbow Mountain, the Sacred Valley, Lake Titicaca. The trips that anchor most Peru itineraries.
By region
Pick your part of Peru.
Cusco for the Inca heartland. The Sacred Valley for the ruins and the salt pans. Lima for the food. Arequipa for the white city and the Colca canyon. Puno for Lake Titicaca. Paracas for the dunes and the coast.
By experience
Or pick what you want to do.
Trek if you came for the Inca Trail. Fly if you want the Nazca lines from above. Ride the dunes, raft the Urubamba, cycle the highlands, or eat your way through Lima.
Beyond the citadel
The valley the Inca farmed.
Ollantaytambo and Pisac above their old terraces, the circular ruins at Moray, the salt pans at Maras. If we had to choose three days in the valley, these are the ones.
The capital's kitchens
Eat your way through Lima.
Ceviche on the coast, the stalls of Surquillo market, pisco sours in Barranco. Our three favourites for a city most travellers only fly through.
The white city
Condors over the canyon.
Arequipa built from pale sillar stone under three volcanoes, and the Colca canyon falling away twice as deep as the Grand. Three trips we would put on any southern run.
Past the mountains
Where the jungle begins.
Puerto Maldonado and Iquitos are the two doors into the Peruvian Amazon. River lodges, oxbow lakes, macaws at the clay licks. Three ways in worth the extra flight.
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