A little background on this trip.

So Peru. Why Peru??? We get that question a lot and it’s a really good question. After all, shouldn’t everyone be interested in going someplace where you will experience temperatures ranging from 40° to 110°F and elevations from 354 feet to 11,024 feet? And don’t forget the vaccinations you need for Yellow Fever, Typhoid, and Malaria, not to mention the drug-store size supply of other “just-in-case” medicines. You’ll just have to overlook the vampire bats and bubonic plague.

Well, Machu Picchu is the primary reason for Peru. Who wouldn’t want to go to “The Lost City of the Incas?” It’s 500+ years old and was only discovered 100 years ago. That sounds pretty cool! It has pretty interesting history. (You should read about it onWikipedia.)

The big trip this year was either Machu Picchu or Greece. Greece has had an interesting year, with the instability of their government and economic system, and don’t forget about their riots. We figured that since it’s been there for thousands of years, it will probably be there for a few more before we get a better chance to go see it. So that left Peru, and it should be easy trip to plan (so we thought). We thought that it would be good to see Machu Picchu before tourism gets the best of it and we trample it to the point where tourism has to be severely regulated. We’d rather see this up-close and in person rather than behind a roped viewing point 50 feet away (think Stonehenge).

So once we settled on Machu Picchu, we had to learn what else we were doing there. We decided to skip hiking up to Machu Picchu on the Inca Trail (we’re not in that good of shape and we like our travel comforts), and we learned that there was a lot to see around the Amazon Basin and the Sacred Valley. There was also the Nazca Lines which no one ever remembers until we describe them (think of big ancient pictures drawn out in the desert that you can only see from a plane – you’ve seen either a NatGeo special on it or learned about it briefly in school).

That pretty much wraps up the Why. The rest of this will explain the How.

This trip has been a bit different to plan than most that either of us has gone on in the past. Generally you decide when and where you're going, book some flights and then start booking places to stay and local transportation. In this case, we did things a bit backwards.

It took us a while to realize that Peru really is a 3rd World country for the most part and a lot of the traditional vacation planning strategies just have to be thrown out the window.

Hotels

There are basically two types of hotels in Peru: Really nice ones and really not-so-nice ones. There’s not much in the middle. The hotels became the center-point of our planning efforts.

There were two locations (Machu Picchu and Amazon Basin) where the hotel options were very limited so that ended up being our first priority. All of the hotels in these locations were expensive so we decided to try out a vacation auction site. These can be a great deal if you have a bit of flexibility and are willing to take a bit of risk. You end up checking availability of the hotel and then bid and hope the dates are still available if you win the bid. This ultimately worked out well and saved quite a bit of money, but it did mean a lot of waiting to confirm we could actually get good deals on one of the sets of dates we were looking to book.

Flights

On this trip, we were using miles to get to and from Peru and there was plenty of availability so we were able to sort out everything else and then book the flights last. In the end, we didn't book our international flights until a month before we were leaving. The domestic flights were pretty easy to deal with other than the fact there are cheap fares for Peru natives which we could see on the Spanish language version of the website. With some translation assistance, we determined those weren't available to us and got things booked.

Local Transportation – Planes, Trains, Buses, and Canoes!

Now before you get all confident in planning a trip like this, make sure you have a firm understanding of all of the local transportation options and schedules.

For example, we got to learn that the trains between Cusco and Machu Picchu only leave in the mornings and come back in the late afternoon. If you need to go between the two some time other than that, you’re out of luck. They also have different classes of trains; some of them are designated as “tourist” trains and can’t be used by locals, and vice-versa. And believe it or not, the only way to get to/from Nasca is by a 6 ½ hour bus ride (fun times!). Some of all of this can make for mis-alignment between various flight/bus/train schedules which will force you into an overnight stay somewhere (for us it was the overnight stay in Lima - oh well, we really needed to check out Lima anyway, right?). We really had to pay attention to all of this, and so far all of our bookings appear to be in alignment. At least it looks that way on paper. You’ll have to follow along with us on the trip to see how it really turns out.

Now about the buses. The Pan-American Highway runs through Peru and is a very popular route, but it is poorly lit, poorly marked, poorly maintained, and is known for putting bus drivers to sleep. In reading about busses, we determined that there are a lot of unsafe bus companies and a shocking number of accidents each year. Even the U.S. Department of State has very strict rules for their employees traveling around Peru. We had considered an overnight bus-trip but quickly decided against that after reading all the stories about drivers falling asleep. We found a company with a good safety record (they change drivers every 4 hours). We have first-class bus seats – yes, they even have different classes for buses – it cost us all of about $2 extra. We get food (we picked Chicken since we could recognize “Pollo” on their menu list) and we should get the chance to play bingo and maybe watch a movie.

We're getting to use all sorts of transportation on the trip. In addition to the planes, trains, and buses we’ve already mentioned, we get to experience a canoe (we assume motorized) to get to the hotel in the Amazon Basin. For the canoe portion of the trip, we’re limited to bringing 22 pounds of luggage , so we’ve had to pack in two separate bags – one to take to the hotel and one to leave at the airport in Puerto Maldonado – (don’t worry, the hotel offers the luggage storage there).

Websites

Clearly there are opportunities for good web designers in Peru as some of the websites we had to use were horrendous. The first issue is they want a tremendous amount of information to book anything (names of everybody, mother's maiden names, birth dates, passport numbers, etc.). On top of that, if you make any mistake, the forms will usually refresh and wipe out everything you've put in. We both had to make calls to credit card companies to ensure them there was no fraud going on and they could approve transactions.

Medical Concerns

Yellow fever, typhoid, malaria, hepatitis, altitude sickness, various stomach ailments,vampire bats, andBubonic Plague(luckily the last two only in Northern Peru). Do we really need to say any more?

But to put our readers at ease, we should tell you that we’ve been vaccinated/medicated against yellow fever, typhoid, malaria, and hepatitis. We’ll have prescription medicines for altitude sickness and various stomach ailments. We’ll just have to take our chances with the bats and the plague.☺

Some past trips:
http://FosterAndFrye.com/NewZealand
http://FosterAndFrye.com/Australia