After a few slightly stressful final days in Ecuador we were looking forward to a more relaxing week in Peru. We spent the first couple of days in Lima, one of the world’s largest cities in a desert. We also heard that it is one of the cloudiest cities in the world which proved very accurate during the few days we were there as we didn’t see the sun once. Lima itself was a lot more modern than we expected, we stayed in the popular area of Miraflores which was really trendy with great restaurants on every corner. We spent an afternoon in the city center (kind of like the ‘old town’ but it’s not generally where all the tourists stay) and we also explored the artsy neighborhood of Barranco.
On one evening we went to a popular restaurant called Panchita and decided to try the Peruvian delicacy which is…. guinea pig!! 😱 it didn’t taste so bad but we probably wouldn’t order it again. We’ll also feel bad everytime we now see a cute little pet guinea pig anywhere!
For the journey from Lima to Cusco we opted for a guided 4-day bus tour (Peru Hop), with overnight stays in Paracas and Huacachina – and a night on the bus.
We made a bit of a mistake not realizing that from our last overnight stay at Huacachina we would not be going directly to Cusco and instead went via the locations we decided to skip having overnight stays in (Nazca and Arequipa) … this resulted in an extremely long and boring 30 hour bus ride!!
It probably would have been possible to change this and have overnight stays in those locations and split up that long bus ride but it would have meant sacrificing some days in the Cusco region which we didn’t want to do.
Our first overnight stay was Paracas, we had a relaxed afternoon and morning and tried some Ceviche (Peru LOVES ceviche.. We aren’t the biggest fans though!) , the main attraction of Paracas is a nearby rock island dubbed ‘the poor man’s Galapagos’ which we decided not to do and instead save some money since we’d recently been to the actual Galapagos! Next we set off to the small oasis of Huacachina where we went on a 2-hour buggy ride through the desert and got to surf on sand dunes.
The next day we embarked on the 30-hour bus ride to Cusco 😬 After a few hours we got to the Nazca tower, from which we were able to see some of the Nazca Lines (tree and hands) before continuing the over-night drive to Arequipa and on to Cusco.
We finally made it through the extremely long bus ride only to be instantly disappointed upon picking up our bags to realize they were placed next to the engine for the last 30 hours and were hot to touch! Definitely not good for a lot of our items to have essentially been cooking for almost 2 days straight….ugh!! We now have 5 days here in Cusco to acclimatise and do a couple of day trips before heading to Maccu Picchu on Saturday.
Random Stats and info
Step count to date: 294,567 or 175.9 km
Peru has been a bit more expensive than Ecudor, we are spending on average £5 per meal.
We’ve been drinking a lot of Pisco based drinks as they’re really cheap (Peru’s favorite alcohol!)
Unlike Ecuador a lot of our hostels haven’t had free drinking water available so we’ve been buying a few bottles and also using our Grayl filter bottle often. We would prefer to not buy many plastic bottles but we only have 2 filters for the filter bottle to last us this whole trip (about 150 uses per filter) so we have to pace out the usage a bit.
Adventure Unknown 