Peru travel guide: Cities, Seasons, and the Complete Trip

How to structure a first trip to Peru

Land in Lima at sea level and then treat the Andean leg as an altitude ladder rather than a list of places. The usual error is flying straight from the coast up to Cusco at about 3,400 m and starting to sightsee the same afternoon. The Sacred Valley lies lower along its whole length, with Pisac at about 2,970 m, Urubamba at about 2,870 m and Ollantaytambo at about 2,790 m, which makes it the better first base on arrival.

A shape that works gives Lima two nights, the Sacred Valley two, one night in Aguas Calientes for Machu Picchu, and Cusco two or three nights at the end rather than the start. Cusco is where the steep lanes and late dinners are, and both land far more easily after a couple of nights several hundred metres lower. Transferring from Cusco airport to the valley within an hour or two of landing is standard practice and costs nothing in sightseeing, since one of the two roads down runs past Pisac.

Extensions belong at the end of the trip, not wedged into the middle. The Amazon has two gateways with quite different logistics: Puerto Maldonado has direct flights from both Cusco and Lima plus short boat transfers to lodges, while Iquitos in the northern jungle has no road link to the rest of the country and is reached only by air or river. Arequipa and the Colca Canyon sit more naturally as a southern add-on than as a detour between Cusco and Machu Picchu.

Getting around: the Ollantaytambo pivot, trains and jungle flights

Use Ollantaytambo rather than Cusco as the pivot for Machu Picchu. The town has its own station, and the run down the Urubamba gorge to Aguas Calientes takes about an hour and a half, with PeruRail services roughly hourly and Inca Rail departures every couple of hours. Boarding closer to Cusco simply adds the road leg to the train leg, since Ollantaytambo station sits around an hour and three quarters from central Cusco by road.

From Aguas Calientes a shuttle bus climbs the switchbacks to the site entrance in around half an hour, and the queue for it builds well before the first departures. Entry runs on dated, timed slots on a named ticket matched to a passport, with admission only inside the booked slot and a fixed circuit to follow once inside, so a missed train has consequences beyond a late start. Booking around a month ahead is the standard advice for a particular date.

Beyond that corridor, long-distance buses cover the coast and the southern circuit cheaply overnight, while the Andes reward flying. Puerto Maldonado is a short hop from Cusco; Iquitos can only be reached by plane or by a multi-day riverboat, and has no direct flights from Cusco at all, which rules it out of a tight itinerary. Inside the Sacred Valley itself, shared colectivo vans link the main towns and are the fastest way to cover short distances.

When to go and what a trip realistically costs

The dry season, roughly May to September, is the only stretch when the high Andes are reliably clear, which is exactly why it is the busiest. Machu Picchu caps daily entry at 5,600 visitors on its designated high-demand dates and 4,500 for the rest of the year, so slots on the more popular circuits go early for June, July and August. The wet months bring afternoon downpours and cloud that can hide the site outright, and the Inca Trail closes for maintenance through February.

Shoulder timing is the honest compromise. Late April, May and early October usually hold dry mornings with thinner queues and greener terraces than midwinter. Lima works against that pattern, since the coast sits under the persistent low cloud known as the garua from roughly May to September and is brightest from around December to March, so a Lima-weighted trip and a Cusco-weighted trip want opposite months.

On money, the two lines that distort a Peru budget are the ones that do not scale with the rest of it. The train to Aguas Calientes and the Machu Picchu entry slot cost broadly the same whether everything else is booked at hostel or hotel level, so both should be budgeted apart from any daily figure rather than folded into it. Hostels, set-menu almuerzos and overnight buses move the daily line a long way; the Machu Picchu day barely moves at all, which is why lean trips and mid-range trips converge on that one day and diverge everywhere else.

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