If you are planning a trip to Peru then you can read the latest travel advisories that theBritish Foreign Office and the US State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs have for visitors to Peru. The US advice is quite off-putting but we always felt quite safe during our tour - even when we were wandering around on our own at night. All of the Peruvians we met were very friendly.

Exchanging Money: US$ are readily accepted at most places and attract a slightly higher exchange rate to US$ travellers cheques. UK £ sterling and £ travellers cheques were not generally accepted. The large towns and cities have Visa ATMs where cash advances/withdrawals can be obtained from credit or debit cards. There are Visa ATMs near the check-in area in Lima’s airport and there is one on the west side of the park in the Miraflores district of Lima. Credit cards are accepted at some (but not all) restaurants and shops.

Visas: At the time that we travelled, British Citizens did not require a visa to enter Peru.

Health & Vaccinations:You should always seek professional advice from your doctor regarding vaccinations when travelling. This is particularly important for a country as diverse as Peru where virtually the full range of inoculations are recommended. However, as an indication only, when we went on our particular tour of Peru, Polio, Tetanus, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, Hepatitis A and Malaria were being prescribed (although some of these are only required for certain regions like the Amazon Basin).

Local tap water is generally not safe to drink so you should drink bottled water. About half of our tour was at a relatively high altitude in the Andes. It is generally recommended to take things easy on arrival at a high location to get used to the thinness of the air. We weren’t adversely affected by this (other than getting noticeably breathless a little too easily) but a few of the others in our group (the younger ones!) were badly affected and missed some of the tour around Cusco.

The food in the tourist restaurants and the hotels that we stayed in was generally safe to eat including the cold and uncooked items. However, we find that, no matter how cautious you are, there is always one meal that will take the majority of the group down with a serious stomach upset. For this tour, it was the breakfast provided by the Hotel Libertador in Arequipa that caused most of our group to suffer from diarrhoea - but luckily it didn’t seem to last for too long.

Other than checking the British and US travel advisories, we didn’t really use the Internet to plan or organise this trip but we have used it since to research some topics for our web page and we have found the following sites that may be useful to you if you are planning a trip to Peru (or just interested in reading more about the country):