Peru Family Travel Guide

Do not sleep in Cusco on night one. Fly into Cusco if you must, because almost every flight goes there, but get in a car and drive straight down to the Sacred Valley. Urubamba and Ollantaytambo sit around nine thousand feet, two thousand feet lower, and that two thousand feet is the difference between a headache and a ruined week.

Ask your doctor about acetazolamide before you go. It is a prescription altitude drug, it is cheap, and it works by helping you acclimatise faster rather than by masking symptoms. It has to be started a day or two before you go up, which means having the conversation at home and not in a pharmacy on the Plaza de Armas. If it is right for your children is a question for your own pediatrician, not for a travel blog.

Build in a nothing day. The single best thing we did was refuse to schedule anything for the first full day. No ruins, no drive, no early start. Just the valley, a slow breakfast and a short walk. If you have five days in Peru you cannot afford this. That is a reason to make it seven, not a reason to skip it.

Entry is by circuit and by time slot. You do not buy a ticket to Machu Picchu. You buy a ticket to a specific route through it at a specific hour. Circuit 2 is the one with the classic view over the terraces, and it is the one that sells out first. If somebody offers you a cheap last minute ticket, check which circuit it is, because several of them never see the postcard angle at all.

The train is the bottleneck. PeruRail and IncaRail both run from Ollantaytambo to Aguas Calientes. It is about ninety minutes through a river gorge and it is one of the loveliest train rides I have taken. It is also the only practical way in. Book the train and the entry ticket together, in that order, because there is no point holding an entry slot you cannot reach.

Then there is a bus, and then there is a line. From Aguas Calientes a shuttle bus switchbacks up to the gate. The line for it starts before dawn. Buy bus tickets the afternoon before rather than standing in two lines in the dark.

Hire the guide. A guide is now required for most circuits anyway, and the site makes almost no sense without one. It is stones and terraces until somebody explains what was grown where and why the windows sit where they do. With children this is the difference between an hour of complaints and actual interest.

Moray and the salt pans. Moray is a set of concentric circular terraces the Inca appear to have used to test crops at different microclimates. It photographs beautifully and it is strange in person. The Maras salt pans are twenty minutes away, thousands of small white evaporation ponds stacked down a hillside, still worked by the same families. Both together make an easy half day.

Ollantaytambo is the one to walk. It is a working Inca town, not a ruin with a town attached. The street plan and the water channels are original and still in use. The fortress above it is a hard climb at altitude and worth it. This is also where your train leaves from, so it is the obvious last night before Machu Picchu.

Chinchero for the weaving. The women’s weaving cooperatives here will show you the whole chain, from washing raw alpaca with a root that lathers like soap, through the cochineal beetle that makes the red, to the finished cloth. It is a demonstration and yes it ends at a table of things to buy. It is also the single best hour of context you will get on what all those textiles in the market actually are.

The Plaza de Armas is the whole point. Two churches, arcades on all four sides, and a constant flow of people. Sit in one of the balcony restaurants for an hour rather than trying to see everything. San Blas up the hill is the artisan quarter and the walk is steep enough that you will feel the altitude.

Qorikancha and Sacsayhuaman. Qorikancha was the Inca sun temple, and a Dominican convent was built straight on top of it. You can see both at once, which tells the story of the conquest better than any museum text. Sacsayhuaman above the city has the enormous fitted stones that make people invent theories.

Watch your pockets in the crowd. Cusco is not dangerous. It does have practiced pickpockets around the plaza and the market, the way Barcelona and Rome do. Nothing about that changed how comfortable I felt walking around at night.

The food is the reason. Peru absorbed Japanese and Chinese immigration in a way no other South American country did, and the cooking that came out of it is its own thing. Nikkei is the Japanese Peruvian strand and chifa is the Chinese Peruvian one. You do not need a tasting menu to eat well here. A neighborhood cevicheria at lunchtime, which is when Peruvians actually eat ceviche, will do it.

Barranco is the neighborhood to walk. Painted houses, murals, the Bridge of Sighs, a lot of bougainvillea, and a cliff path down to the sea. It is small enough to cover on foot with children and it is where I would stay if I were doing it again.

The coast is for looking at, not swimming. The Humboldt current runs up this coast and the water is cold and gray most of the year. The cliff parks in Miraflores are lovely and the paragliders launching off them will hold a child’s attention for a long time. Nobody comes to Lima for the beach.

Fly the long legs. Lima to Cusco is an hour and twenty minutes and costs less than a nice dinner. The bus is twenty two hours. Lima to Arequipa, Lima to Puerto Maldonado for the Amazon, Lima to Juliaca for Titicaca, all the same story. Book these as you book the trip, not on arrival.

Hire a driver in the Sacred Valley, do not self drive. A car with a driver for the day costs less than a rental plus fuel in most of Europe, and it means somebody else deals with the switchbacks, the altitude and the roadworks. This is the single best value purchase on a Peru trip.

The trains are for Machu Picchu and for scenery. The Ollantaytambo line is the practical one. The Cusco to Puno train across the altiplano is a full day, expensive, and spectacular. Neither is a cheap way to move.

Soles, and carry cash. The sol is the currency. Cards work in Lima and Cusco hotels and restaurants and stop working the moment you are in a market or a small town. Take out soles at a bank ATM, not at the airport, and always decline the machine’s offer to charge you in dollars.

Do not drink the tap water. Not in Lima, not in Cusco, not anywhere. Bottled or filtered, and use it for teeth as well. Hotels almost all supply it. This is the single most common way visitors lose two days.

No visa for Americans, Canadians or the EU. Ninety days on arrival for tourism. Your passport needs six months of validity. There is no vaccination requirement for the standard Lima and Cusco route, though yellow fever comes into it if you are adding the Amazon, so ask your doctor about that leg specifically.

May to September is the dry season and the busy one. Clear mornings, cold nights, and the whole world there with you. June to August is peak. If you want the postcard weather at Machu Picchu this is when it happens, and it is also when you must book four to six months out.

April and October are the sweet spot. Shoulder either side of the dry season. Green rather than brown, meaningfully fewer people, and rain that comes in the afternoon rather than all day. This is when I would go.

January to March is the wet season. Heavy afternoon rain, cloud sitting on the ruins, and the Inca Trail closed for maintenance in February. Machu Picchu itself stays open. Prices drop hard. If your only window is February, go, just do not expect the view.

Book it if you want the trip to mean something. Families with children over eight who will remember it. First time South America travelers, because Peru is the easiest of the big six to organize. Anyone who cares about food. Anyone who has done the European cities and wants the next thing.

Skip it if you have five days. Peru with less than eight nights is a bad trip. You will spend two of them acclimatising and two of them in transit. If five days is the window, go to Mexico or Costa Rica and save Peru for when you have the time.

Skip it with toddlers. Altitude, long drives, early starts and archaeology. There is no version of this that works well with a three year old, and the Caribbean or Costa Rica is right there.

How it compares to its neighbors. Peru is the most complete single country trip in South America, because it has the ruins, the food, the mountains and the Amazon in one place. Ecuador does the same thing smaller and cheaper and adds the Galapagos. Chile and Argentina are for landscape rather than history and cost noticeably more. Colombia is easier and warmer and has nothing on this scale. Brazil is a different continent in temperament and does not overlap with Peru at all.

How affordable it is once you are there. The flight is the expensive part. On the ground, a private driver, good hotels and eating well cost a fraction of what the same trip costs in Europe. The exception is Machu Picchu itself, where the tickets, the train and the bus stack up fast.

Cusco is cold at night. People pack for Peru as if it were the Amazon. In June the valley drops close to freezing after dark and a lot of hotels have no central heating, just a hot water bottle in the bed. Which is charming right up until it is not.

The textiles are not all real. A lot of what is sold as alpaca in the markets is acrylic. Buy from a cooperative where you have watched the process, or from a proper shop, and expect to pay accordingly.