Exploring Peru: Travel Insights & Mistakes to Avoid

I’ve now finished catching up on the blogs from our Peru trip in 2023. Writing up the stories and just remembering the experiences has been lots of fun, and bought all the memories of a wonderful trip.

Peru was our first trip without the kids for 20 years, so it was always going to be special. Writing up the stories has reminded just how much fun we had, in fact, quite a bit more fun than some of our subsequent adventures.

Talking to Wooksie about this, we concluded that the reason we had that much fun was the quirky people we met, which hasn’t been the case on more recent trips, and we believe that was because we did more organised trips and events.

In our more recent adventures to South America, Costa Rica and Tanzania, we increased our level of independence to make our way around and used one day trips, rather than multi day tours which we used in Peru, so that’s a lesson for us as we start to plan for our next adventure to Vietnam.

Here are the 3 things that stood out to me from writing the blogs.

Altitude sickness

Until writing these blogs I hadn’t realised how much this had dominated our trip. Wooksie was very poorly at one point, and took a couple of weeks to get over it.

1. The warning were all there but I didn’t take them seriously, all the advice from friends and online was “She will get over it”, but anything more that 24 hours look into getting some oxygen.
2. We flew from sea level to 4000m at Puno, in hindsight if we had gone by coach she would probably have adjusted with the gradual increas.

Use Peru Hop for travel

We used them for the 3 day tour south of Lima, but I wished we had known about the extent of their network. Their daily coaches connect all the major places you will want to see so it saves loads of messing about. We met nearly all the fun people on this trip whilst travelling with PeruHop. It is very much 2 star, but it works most of the time.

Don’t skip the Amazon trip

We did, and I regretted it for the next 2 years and ended up on a massive 2 day detour when we were in Brazil, we could have done it quite easily from Peru. The Peruvian Amazon is one of the best ways to see the jungle with more wildlife than around Manaus in Brazil, the other option for good wildlife is Ecuador.