This post is later in coming than I would have liked. We visited there in March 2022 and spent 18 days. Eighteen days in not nearly enough to get even a decent overview of this large and diverse country. Tanya joined me for the first week in Lima and Paracas/Pisco. When she left I went on to Cusco and then returned to Lima for a few days before leaving.
First, I mentioned Peru was a large country and want to back that up with a few statistics for comparison as I didn’t realize how big it was until I started trying to plan an itinerary. In terms of geographical area, Peru is roughly the size of Alaska. It is the 20th largest country in the world by area, between Mongolia and Chad. In terms of population, it is midway between Texas and California. This makes it the 43rd most populous country in the world between Uzbekistan and Angola. Lima for its part is about the size of Chicago or Bangkok. In terms of climate, what do you want? Lima is coastal and stays in the 70s most of the time. Cusco is at about 12,000 feet, parts of the country are in the Amazon rain forest and a large desert lies in the south part of the country and Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world.
Really my only complaint about Peru is that it does not have great public transit. The more I travel, the more I prefer to use public transit — good public transit save both money and time. Having said that, the cost of living in Lima is about half that of Chicago and it has better weather. That’s a pretty good way to segue into Lima. It’s about the size of Chicago at half the cost and with the weather of LA. As I mentioned, the public transit is not great and the traffic can be bad, though the little driving I did there I thought the degree was greatly overstated. I didn’t find it to be as bad as LA or Chicago. The good news is that Lima is walkable and there weather usually makes the walking pleasant. It is gray and overcast and looks like it is going to rain most of the time, but seldom does. The city has many great neighborhoods like Miraflores and Barranco (these are where tourists tend to land. We stayed in Miraflores.
So what is there to do in Lima? I would not consider it to be a great tourist city. Most people fly into Lima and maybe spend a day or two and head to Cusco. That’s not a bad way to do it, but if you do you’re missing out on one of the great food cities of the world. The problem is what to do between meals.
The main categories of food that Peru is famous for are ceviche, Pollo a la brassa, and the parilla. I started off on a ceviche bender — to the point that I had a gout flare-up and had to dial it back. There is also a large Asian influence to Peruvian cuisine from both Japan and China. I was told that the Japanese influence can mainly be seen in the ceviche and as a stand alone cuisine, there’s not that much. As for the Chinese, there is an actual Chinatown near the historic Centro and Peruvian-Chinese fusion called Chifa is everywhere. Chifa was not my favorite, it reminded of 70s American Chinese. We booked a food tour through AirBnB (Edwin Lopez and Zuly) that took us to the Chorillos fishing village and then to a market near Barranco. The variety of fruits and vegetables was incredible with most things not being readily available in the US. Our heads were spinning. The guide bought a wide assortment of goods and took us to a restaurant in the market where we sampled the various fruits and had a variety of dishes prepared. The tour ended with an art walk of the murals of Barranco. The problem with not taking notes and then waiting months to write is that details fade and thus become sparse. I do know that I would recommend this tour.
When traveling to a large city in a low cost area, we usually try and dine at least once at a high end, Michelin starred restaurant (note: Michelin is a bit snobby and doesn’t produce guides most if not all of Latin America, so no Michelin stars, their loss the food in many of these places is better than most other places on earth). For Lima, we chose Central. Central does a tasting menu and reservations are required. The meal itself is a food tour of Peru (they also do actual food tours of Peru). Each course used different ingredients from different regions of Peru and covered the entirety of the country. The meal was fabulous and informative and the restaurant was striking and we will probably never go back. The problem with tasting menus is that some things are going to be excellent and others not so much. SO as it meal, it doesn’t hold up. On the other hand to see the creativity of one of the world’s greatest chefs at the top of their game is amazing. Each dish is expertly curated to highlight a particular part of the culture and the soil and the climate of a place is something to not be passed up. The thought that goes into plating is more than the amount of preparation that goes into most of my meals. I would equate a meal like this to seeing Guernica. Don’t go to Madrid without seeing Guernica. Try an amazing restaurant like Central and marvel in knowing what the possibilities are.
On a day to day basis, the many restaurants of Lima and the rest of Peru offer many great choices and a great meal can be had for a bargain price. As mentioned above, ceviche, pollo a la brassa, and parilla are all excellent, national dishes. Chifa is also popular. Try it you might like it. The coast of Peru lies on the Humboldt current which keeps the water cool, the air dry and the weather beautiful. It also provides some of the world’s best fisheries. Ceviche is chemically cooked fish, which means marinated in citrus. There are many varieties of ceviche and I didn’t have any that wasn’t outstanding. The key elements are citrus, fish or shellfish, and some vegetables — usually onion, sweet potato, and corn. The pollo a la brassa is basically rotisserie chicken. I don’t know what they do to it but this is not your Boston Chicken rotisserie chicken. Parilla basically means grilled meat, In a sense, it falls in with pollo a la brassa, but they are often found in separate restaurants. The parilla can be just about any kind of meat and it’s usually served with rice and potatoes. Peruvians love their starch. This brings up potatoes. Peru is the ancestral home of the potato. There are something like 4,500 different varieties of potato in Peru. Peruvians take their potatoes seriously using different varieties for different uses. They can get a little carried away with this and sometimes the selected variety is too starchy for the nonPeruvian palette. The tour guide on the food tour I went on in Cusco told me that one variety was covered with spikes and was known as what translated to ‘Potato of Tears’. Its traditional use is for a boy’s mother to boil it and give it to her son’s girlfriend to peal as a test to see whether the girl is a worthy bride. She reported that she failed, but was already pregnant so it didn’t matter.
So what it there to do in Lima? We stayed in the Miraflores area which includes Parque Kennedy and the Malecon as well as markets and ancient ruins called Huaca Pucllana. When we were there reservations were required for Huaca Pucllana, so we didn’t go. It’s a fairly small site and much of it can be seen from the outside. It is made from adobe bricks and thus different from the Incan ruins near Cusco. Parque Kennedy and the Malecon are both great places to people watch. Parque Kennedy, named for JFK and known for its many resident cats used to keep down the rat population, is surrounded by shops and restaurants. We preferred the Cafe Haiti. The park is slow to get going in the morning and doesn’t really populate until afternoon. In the evening it is lively with locals, eating from various street food vendors, dancing in the round theatre, and viewing artists wares. The malecon is a long walkway on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. It is also full of locals doing whatever they do. Outside of Miraflores, Barranco is another popular upscale neighborhood with many restaurants. It is well known for it murals and is a little further from the historic center than Miraflores. Bosque de Olivar is another neighborhood worth considering. It is closer in and may cost a bit more. It has a ton of Olive trees, hence the name. There’s also the Historic Centro, which I don’t hear about a lot of people staying there. It does have the Plaza de Armas and the Conviento de San Francisco. The catacombs tour of the Convent is interesting, though when I was there was only available in Spanish so I understood very little of what was said. There are also museums and other things to do in this area.
We rented a car for two days to go to Paracas National Preserve and Ballestas Island. It is possible to take a tout to these areas, but they are 3-4 hours away and to go Ballastats, the boat leaves around 9a, after that the water is pretty choppy and the boats don’t run. So, all of the tours we found left Lima at about 5a went to Ballastas, Paracas, then to some place for Dune Buggy rides or sand boarding, and then to a Pisco tasting and returned to Lima around 10p. This sounded awful, so we rented a car and drove out to Paracas arriving in the afternoon. We stayed in the town of Pisco which is a fishing village and not where the drink is made. The next morning we caught the boat to Balastas aka the poor man’s Galapagos and then drove back to Lima, skipping anything related to dunes. This worked out well as we didn’t want to get up at 5a and spend 17 hours on a tour bus during a pandemic. The main attraction for us was Ballastas Island. The tour lasts a couple of hours and is home to sea lions and many bird species. It was very valuable in the last century due to the many feet of guano that had accumulated over the centuries.
After Tanya left, I flew to Cusco with the plan of catching a PeruHop bus to Titicaca for an overnight trip. My flight was delayed and I had to cancel this part of the trip. Cusco though was Incan capitol and amazing if not overrun with tourists. There are many Incan sites that are well worth seeing, seek out the 12 sided stone — it sounds silly, but it is impressive. When I was there, I had an impromptu tour thrust upon me. I gave the guy some money for walking me around the building and point out other parts of the stone masonry. There are many examples of amazing stone masonry from the Incans and also many sites of Spanish domination. The city of Cusco is fairly compact and a day or more can be spent walking around the Plaza de Armas and Historico Centro. Qoracancha (Temple of the Sun) is well worth a guided tour. Also Sachayhuaman (pronounced Sexy Woman) is good. I would recommend a tour or at least a car here. I walked. It is not that far, but it’s all uphill, starting at about 12,000 feet. I also went on a food tour that focused mostly on the market. In general, we’re big fans of food tours. Food is such an integral part of culture, so much can be learned about a culture through its food. In addition, I did a day trip to Maras and Moray that included ATV riding. Nothing against ATVs, except that they tend to attract Eurotrash who don’t care much for safety. These sites are worth seeing. One is an experimental agricultural station used by the Inca and the other is an Incan salt making site.
Machu Picchu: The way most people, including me do MP is to get up really early and catch a van that collects people from various hotels around Cusco. The van takes you to Ollytaytambo where you catch a train Aguas Caliente. From there you catch a bus to MP. This works. If I were to do it again, I would travel to Ollytaytambo and spend the night, get up at a more reasonable time to catch the train to Aquas Caliente. Is it happened, I did not spend any time in Ollytaytambo. By all accounts it is at its core, an ancient Incan village and worth a little time. As i said, I didn’t do that and just passed through on the way to Aguas Caliente. Aguas Caliente is a mass of souvenir shops and tourist restaurants. You could spend the night there as well though it is little more than a tourist trap. The buses to MP run on a loop, queue up and take the next available bus. You can also walk. However, it is narrow windy road with no shoulder and constant tour buses in each direction. People do it.
MP is amazing mainly for its preservation. With the exception of the thatch roofs, it is almost prestine. There is an optional tour up to a higher part of MP. I didn’t do this as I would have died climbing up there. The normal tour takes about two hours. The purpose of MP remains a mystery. My guide believed it to be just a village citing the lack of burial grounds and ceremonial places.
Overall, Peru is an amazing country and 18 days is not nearly enough time to cover it. There are places to the north that predate MP and there are other sites similar to MP that are harder to get to. There’s also the desert, the amazon and Titicaca that we didn’t get to. I wish I had planned the trip more to make the most of it and I wish Titicaca would not have been cancelled. It’s actually pretty cheap and easy to get there. We flew for under $400 r/t and hotels were inexpensive. I was also surprised that credit cards were accepted almost everywhere. My other surprise was that English was not as widely spoken as in other Latin Americans I have been to. Having said that, it is a pretty easy place to get around and should not be overlooked.