Peru trip report - I am now an evangelist for Cusco

Day 3. Day trip to Caral. I had trouble finding information about this before I left, so I hope this is useful to someone. Caral is an archaeological site as old as ancient Egypt, north of Lima in the Supe River Valley. You get there via a day trip from Lima that starts very early in the morning in a vain attempt to beat Lima's ungodly traffic. I booked with a company called Inca Trilogy Tours; they picked me up at 6am and I was again surprised to discover that I was the only customer. We drove in a sedan with a driver and a guide (it would be impossible to talk while driving!). We made it half an hour north before hitting heavy traffic in Los Olivos. The road was a combination 8-lane highway, neighborhood street, ad hoc bus stop, and produce market. Rising along both sides were the unplanned settlements called pueblos jovenes. I didn't initially understand why Miraflores was known as such a wealthy neighborhood, but I did after seeing these places where tens of thousands of immigrants from the countryside live. After 90 minutes of swerving, stop-and-go traffic, we came to a toll plaza, where I suspect the driver was shaken down by a policeman. Then a modern highway through a strangely foggy region, a semi-paved road through an agricultural area, and through the River Supe, which was thankfully low. The drive there was ~4 hours and landed us at an oddly gigantic and well-provisioned parking/welcome area, as if they expected Disney-sized crowds to succeed in arriving there. We spent about 90 minutes at the site and I saw only three other visitors. It was fairly interesting, but I didn't get a lot out of the tour. There are multiple pyramids of different sizes, a theater, agricultural buildings, and other unexplained structures. I wonder if the guide knew more than his English allowed him to share. I felt like just spending two hours reading all the placards might have been more informative. We stopped for lunch in Huacho and then did an equally arduous drive back by a different route, reaching the hotel at 5:30pm.

Day 4. In the morning, I walked through the Parque Kennedy, which is delightfully full of community cats, to Huaca Pucllana, a really unique mudbrick monument. A mandatory tour, but the guide was good. Took the Metropolitano to the Old Town and walked around. After lunch, I visited the Casa Aliaga, a house that has been in the same family for 17 generations. They still live there so you can only visit with an approved guide; I'd booked with Ana Chacón Ramos from their list. I also visited several churches/monasteries and the Plaza nearby.

Day 5. Early flight to Cusco. After dropping off my luggage and having lunch, I started orienting myself on foot--but slowly, as I definitely felt the altitude (11,000+ feet), even with Diamox. I visited the Museo Casa Concha, which now houses the Machu Picchu artifacts that Yale returned only recently. (Worthwhile preparation for visiting Machu Picchu itself but I was cringing inwardly to know that I'd probably seen all the items back when I was in college there!) Then my friends texted that they'd also arrived and were on the balcony of a cafe on the Plaza de Armas, so I joined them and we were soon amazed by an endless procession in honor of Santa Rosa de Lima. Countless groups of dancers in different costumes, kids, bands. We watched for a while from the balcony and then went down to the street. It really felt like an event that every member of the family could participate in, not a parade for people to stand by and watch. (Not my video but this gives a taste of it.)

Day 6. I arranged to do a half-day weaving workshop at the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales--something culturally enriching but not physically arduous. I found this very worthwhile but with two caveats. Backstrap weaving feels hard on your back if you're not used to the position, so I was glad I only committed to a half day. Also, the instructors speak Quechua and some Spanish, but not English. I speak very minimal Spanish but know how to knit, embroider, etc. The other student didn't know anything about fiber crafts or charted patterns, but spoke Spanish. I think it would be a steep learning curve without one skill or the other.

In the afternoon, I visited a few churches that I knew wouldn't be on our "official" tour later in the week. At one of them, I ended up watching the beginning of a wedding from the choir loft that I happened to be in at that moment. I later saw another procession, the same bride and groom, with a band and dancers in folkloric masks and costumes. Also did some shopping at the many stores selling alpaca sweaters, etc. Walking through the steep and cobblestoned streets, I encountered a woman with two festively attired baby alpacas. She charged me to take a picture with them which felt cheesy, but my father was so delighted when I sent it to him that I was happy I did it.

Day 7. Met the Backroads group, 12 visitors and 2 guides. We did a few miles of gentle (but high-elevation) hiking before lunch, then visited the salineras, terraced ponds where families harvest salt. We stayed two nights at Sol y Luna, a large, comfortable ranch.

Day 8. We visited Ollantaytambo, a very interesting Inca town and archaeological site. Throughout the week, we had an additional local guide who did the cultural and historical interpretation--he was really excellent. After lunch, we visited Huilloc, a remote traditional village. We saw more weaving, a local home, guinea pigs. The children performed a dance they'd been working on.

Day 9. We hiked a portion of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. We left the hotel very early for a shuttle to the Ollantaytambo train station. The staff for our train car led us on yet another betasseled, musical procession to board. During the ~90-minute ride, there were free snacks, multiple musical groups, even a short dramatic skit of a traditional love story. The train stopped in a clearing at Km. 104, where only our group disembarked.

From here, it was a challenging ~7 mile hike on a narrow, one-way trail with 2000 ft. each of ascent and descent and sections of uneven stone stairs. This being Backroads, the group had several porters who carried extra water and a gourmet picnic lunch (from Cicciolina, which Coffee Girl had recommended!). I loved the sights on this hike: the soaring views our hard climbing work earned us, the cloud forest, Wiñay Wayna, a dramatic waterfall, the stonework, and then entering Inti Punku to see the view of Machu Picchu unfold below. We hiked down through Machu Picchu (Circuit 5) and took a bus down to the town of Aguas Calientes, where we stayed at the Inkaterra Machu Picchu for two nights, surrounded by cloud forest.

Day 10. We did a nature tour of the hotel's gardens, including orchids and a tea plantation, before taking the bus back up to Machu Picchu. We had lunch at a buffet just outside the entrance before re-entering for our more complete historical/cultural tour on Circuit 2-A, which took about 2.5 hours. There is little to no signage here so our excellent local guide was essential to appreciate the site.

Day 11. Despite fanatical avoidance of tap water, I got quite sick early this morning (probably due to trusting some raw veg at the restaurants I considered "Backroads-approved"). We took the train back to Ollantaytambo, and then a shuttle back to Cusco which unfortunately involved an episode of dramatic roadside vomiting for me. I wasn't the first person to get sick and everyone was sympathetic. The rest of the group did a tour of Cusco while I was transported to the hotel with the rest of the luggage. I was so disappointed to miss seeing some of the major sights I'd been 'saving' with our local guide, but at least the Belmond Monasterio was an elegant place to be sick. Watched TV on my iPad and consumed oral rehydration salts.

Day 12. I felt somewhat better but decided to play it safe and skip the morning's hike in favor of seeing the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art near the hotel. (This was fine but probably not essential since Museo Larco in Lima is much bigger and has better context, and Casa Concha is more locally focused.) I took a cab to meet the group for a picnic lunch--more music, and a local shaman performed a ceremony for us. Then we did a tour of Sacsayhuamán before descending into Cusco through the pretty San Blas neighborhood. We had our final dinner at Cicciolina.

Day 13. One last morning of the tour. We visited the San Pedro Market which combined some amount of touristy junk with all kinds of local staples: a whole aisle of bread, an aisle of butter and cheese, a slippery butcher's aisle that only a few of us entered. On the way back, we stopped at Ruro Chocolates. I didn't eat any of the chocolate until I got home and I would have bought a lot more if I'd known how good it was! I especially liked the chocolate with Andean mint (muña).

The group said our farewells at this point and I managed a lunch of soup at the hotel. I was still far from 100% but determined to catch the remaining headliner city sights: Qorikancha, an Inca temple whose foundations were reused for a Dominican monastery, and the Cathedral, which combined elements of local and European art in a unique floorplan and which even today contains a startling amount of gold and silver. This last day felt a little frenetic but I had plenty of time to sit later. I left early that evening for the airport and then flew Cusco - Lima - Atlanta - Philadelphia.

Reflections:

I planned the extra Cusco days purely for acclimatization purposes and didn't consider the Backroads trip's Cusco time to be a major draw, but I absolutely loved it. I will note that my Day 7 was a major national holiday (Santa Rosa de Lima) so I think we caught a lot of seasonal festivities while not being inconvenienced by stuff being closed on the holiday itself (because we were hiking).

Machu Picchu is worthwhile but the overtourism problem is noticeable; they now limit visitors to certain "circuits" for tours, and I admit my own snobbery in being mystified by visitors who seemed to be there with no guide, just taking pictures of themselves in front of the view. I'm not sure I would have considered the nuisance of scheduling tickets to the site and the bus worth it if Backroads hadn't done all the work. (I think it would absolutely be worth visiting this region without Machu Picchu tickets--all the other places we saw were so interesting and not crowded at all.) When I got home, I saw many photos/videos from people who'd been there at roughly the same time and had dreadful weather: drenching rain and impenetrable fog. I got lucky with perfect weather for the whole 2 weeks, but Backroads' smart plan of splitting the visit over two days would also have been insulation against bad weather.

I initially decided to spend 1-2 days in Lima since it was on the way, and then extended that to 3 because it seemed stupid to go to work on a Monday and then take the rest of the next two weeks off. Even setting aside my Caral day, I found the difficulty of getting around to be a real detractor--I gave up on dinner options outside of the immediate area of my hotel, for example. In the end, I was semi-satisfied with having taken a day to see Caral because I was interested in the site and had the time to do it, but I should have invested more effort in finding the right guide since it was an entire day. These are the days I'd abridge if short on time.

I found the vigilance over food/water to be kind of exhausting, and I still got sick! My friends and I each brought a veritable pharmacy. Diamox helped--I've had headaches and very poor sleep at altitude in the past, but with it, I just felt a little out of shape. I did not immediately take my antibiotics after getting sick but I wish I had; my friend did and recovered faster.

This trip was amazing but made me feel like I need to at least alternate with destinations where I speak the language well and can drink tap water!

Awesome TR, and super helpful as I am headed there in April, and am now wrapping up my plans. Lots of good useful info here, and (happily) confirms and aligns reasonably well with much of my plan. Looks like your trip was 13 days, we will have 18. Our plan goes roughly like this:

1. Fly from Seattle to Lima overnight (one stop in Houston). We arrive in Lima at 6 am, but we're flying in business class with a lay flat bed so we should get about 6 hours of solid sleep on the way; I plan to spend the arrival day sightseeing.
2. Two days in Lima, staying in Miraflores.
3. Out of Lima by bus, going south along the coast (to Paracas, Huacachina, Nazca) focused primarily on the landscapes and Nazca sites (Nazca Lines and ancient aqueducts plus archaeological Site of Cahuachi, with pyramids), yet another pre-Inca civilization. Overnight bus to Arequipa.
4. Three days in/around Arequipa. Side trip to Colca Canyon (twice as deep as Arizona's Grand Canyon). Bus to Sacred Valley.
5. The remaining nine days of the trip will be in/around Sacred Valley. We will be using Urubamba (6 days) as our primary base, including 2 days at Machu Picchu; with our last 3 days in Cusco. From Urubamba and Cusco, I'm hoping to visit as many of the Inca archeological sites as possible (I've got a list of about 16 sites, all of which look incredible...and I keep finding more, so my list is growing; I'm going to need to prioritize those and organize them by area). We will hire a driver for those days of ruin-hopping so we can maximize our time on sites and minimize the driving around. We will be staying in El Monasterio in Cusco. I suspect the "pumping oxygen into your room" bit is more a marketing gimmick than actually helpful, but the place looks lovely (and since it was built as a catholic monastery on the foundation of the ruins of the last Inca emperor's palace, I can't help but wonder about its karma...but I could not resist).

On our second-to-last day, we're doing a hike that's at (OMG) about 13,000 feet elevation. Our guide says he'll have oxygen along just in case... We will have spent the previous 16 days starting at Sea Level, and gradually gaining elevation every day, so by the time we reach Cusco (and that 13,000' MSL hike) we will be about as acclimated as we are ever going to get. I'm keeping my fingers crossed (but will be bringing a thermos full of hot coca-leaf tea in case we need it).

One question for you about your unfortunate gastro-intestinal experience: Looking over your profile, I can see you're an experienced traveler (in fact, your places-visited list overlaps pretty closely with mine). You've been to plenty of places where you must follow strict water/food discipline - and it sounds like you were pretty good about sticking to that on this trip. Sounds like you're pretty sure it was the raw veggies at a "Backroads-approved" restaurant that did you in? It's been a long, long time since I got really sick on a trip (Essaouira, Morocco, 1994, I remember it well, having spent the next 24 hours in a lovely bathroom in my hotel...in my case, I was in an upscale restaurant, saw the green salad glistening in the sunlight, and after 2 weeks backpacking through Morocco, I finally broke down, my resistance failed me...that crisp iceberg lettuce got me.

Did everyone on your trip get sick, or just those who gave in to the temptation of fresh guacamole and tomatoes? I assume you are obsessive about drinks, ice, water-in-the-shower, brushing your teeth with only bottled water (or something else from a sealed bottle - I once used beer while camping in Mexico...not recommended, but I did NOT get sick). In developing countries, I'm extremely vigilant - sounds like in your case there, it was the temptation of fresh crisp veggies, true? At least it happened in your last few days, and you had a lux place to recover.

Thanks again for the great TR. I might ping you with a question or two sometime!

Ah, one more detail: When (what year) was your trip?

Peru does seem to be experiencing an explosion of tourism; the management system at Machu Picchu (all the various "circuits", restrictions and the surprisingly complex system of just getting a ticket to enter the place) is more than a little off-putting

But I figure it's probably not going to get any better/easier/less crowded with the passage of time, so unless/until a time-machine is available, might as well go now...

Responding to a few things David asked/ mentioned....
Food sickness is pretty common, but not any more so than SE Asia, for example, and probably not as dire as india. I've had two bouts of short, intense sickness in the 16 months I've lived here. My sister did get quite sick when she visited, my father-in-law didn't. Bring stomach meds.

Are you staying in Paracas? If so, I would strongly suggest staying outside of the town itself, closer to the national park. I found the town very unpleasant and dirty, and the beach gross. I have no desire to go back. The boat trip to the islands to see the penguins was fun, though.

@CG: We are actually just going to blow through Paracas. We will be overnighting in Huacachina instead (we will have a few hours in Paracas between buses. So we might do a quick boat tour out to the Ballestas, might not). I was all jazzed to go but then I learned that the Humbolt penguins (wife wants to see them) have been in decline, and El Niño generally reduces their numbers; this year we are getting a super El Niño, so I'm questioning whether we should squeeze in the islands or give them a breather with two less tourists to bother them.

Our destination for the night is Huacachina because 1) there seems to be no eco-threat to the sand dunes and the oasis (other than mass tourism, which looks like it has taken over), and 2) also because our priorities for the area are associated with the Nazca and Cahuachi civilations (the famous geoglyphs, and the little visited pyramid-like archeological site, respectively), not so much riding giant dune buggies and surfing down the dunes (though I do have had that annoying song, "Midnight at the Oasis" stuck in my head). And because they're on the way to Arequipa, which has a greater pull for us.

I will be quite careful about food/drinks/water throughout the trip (but will bring meds along just in case). We go to SE Asia frequently (my spouse is Thai) and I generally don't get sick there (though I'm pretty darn careful). Hoping for similar results in Peru!

Great report. I, too, enjoyed Cusco. A highlight for us was a private tour we booked with a local student who was connected with an orphanage to which we had a previous connection.

We also visited Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu (2 visits), and Lima, as well as a few other stops in the Sacred Valley. We didn't hike to MP, and we didn't take public transit in Lima. You are brave! I agree that traffic in Lima is busy (and scary!), and that there are definitely areas where the poverty is apparent. We stayed in Barranco, at an artist's home, but it was walking distance to Miraflores, and both areas were definitely more well-to-do than some we passed through.

Did you see the big statue, El Beso, at the Love Park in Miraflores? The artist who did that sculpture (and who, along with his wife, is depicted) is Victor Delfin, whose home we stayed at.

We also visited Museo Larco. Did you go to the annex with the erotic art? We were instructed by Delfin's daughter not to miss it.

Anyway, sounds like you had an incredible trip. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing! We are headed to Peru this spring and have 5 nights in Cusco. I’m mostly worried about my DH, who has asthma and with the high altitude, fingers crossed we have no issues.

I'm glad to hear so many people are headed to Peru! This trip was just a few weeks ago--I got home the day before Labor Day. I agree with David's thought--wish I'd gone in 1995 but the next best time might be now. I believe the government is trying to bolster interest in additional sites like Caral to try to spread out tourism better.

At Museo Larco, I did go into the erotic art exhibit with my guide and she really added a lot to the experience! Instead of it feeling like "teehee, naked people!" she really explained how the imagery fit into indigenous religious beliefs.

Re: altitude, I was very satisfied with taking Diamox. You can't just take it when you're already having symptoms; you're supposed to start before you arrive at altitude (in my case, the evening before I left Lima). The only side effect I experienced was an occasional pins and needles sensation in my feet. I have some symptoms of asthma and have previous gotten nasty, migraine-like headaches (e.g. in Colorado) but with Diamox I only felt more challenged than usual going up stairs/hills (which isn't too surprising since I live someplace flat, basically at sea level).

Re: gastro illness, there wasn't any particular meal that felled multiple people. The person in our group who was most sick had to sit out the Ollantaytambo and Inca Trail days and attributed it to a fruit she tried (granadilla, which you peel before eating--I'm not sure why she thought that, though). A few others were mildly sick at other times through the week. My experience is that onset of symptoms can be so long after you encounter the food/water in question that unless you have a really lucky coincidence (like eating dinner with someone two days ago and not sharing anything else and you get the same symptoms), you're never really going to know. I was very sick in Buenos Aires with what I now suspect was norovirus, so I'm actually only 1 for 3 in illness-free South American trips (2 for 2 in Mexico, though!). I guess I try to be philosophical about the likelihood of getting sick in new environments. I was brushing my teeth with bottled water, but I did eat, for example, multiple apples throughout in the trip--hotels will wash fruit in filtered water and wrap them in plastic film to indicate that they're washed. The Backroads staff said that the restaurants they select wash fruit/veg in filtered water, but who knows? Maybe I got careless in the shower. I try not to overuse antibiotics and my doctor had suggested that I reserve them for fever or more serious symptoms, but my symptoms lingered longer than my friend's so I wish I'd just done it right away. Also maybe I should just bring some Metamucil caplets with me so I'm not so focused on vegetables!

At Museo Larco, I did go into the erotic art exhibit with my guide and she really added a lot to the experience! Instead of it feeling like "teehee, naked people!" she really explained how the imagery fit into indigenous religious beliefs.

Yes. As an Indigenous person, myself, who taught Indigenous Studies for several years, I'm always interested in the cultural and religious significance of items in museums. (But as an Indigenous person, I'm also aware that many of us traditionally have an openly bawdy sense of humour.)

I mention it because Delfin's daughter (who was the one who recommended Museo Larco to us, in general), said that many people miss it because it's in a separate building.

I've been considering a short trip to Peru for next year and this excellent report has really given me a push!

I was there in the 1980s, so thinking of only visiting Lima, Cuzco and Sacred Valley on a future trip.....in reverse order, and skipping MP.

Is it odd that I find some similarities between Cusco and Oaxaca?

Thanks so much for taking time, and I am also eager to read David's comments after his own trip in April!!