Our habit of regularly going on 3 or 4 trips per year means that we usually don’t plan our trips very far in advance. However, during 1999 and the build up to the Year 2000 celebrations, we knew that we would have to temporarily change our habits and book our Christmas trip before any other trips that we were going to go on that year. The hype over the Year 2000 celebrations had pushed up the prices for many prime destinations to extortionate levels so we were determined to avoid these (although it would have been good to straddle the dateline!). Our first choice, after checking our short-list and world temperature guide, was Kuoni’s “Highlights of Peru” tour as we had really enjoyed their Mexican Panorama tour and it had given us the urge to learn more about other ancient American civilisations. We also wanted to visit the South American continent so that we could finally say that we had been to all four corners of the world!
Unfortunately, we found that Kuoni don’t run their Highlights of Peru tour in December so we had to choose somewhere else for Christmas (we ended up going on a very reasonably priced tour of Sri Lanka). However, as you can see, this minor setback didn’t stop us from going on the Peru tour. It just made us change the date to earlier in the year. Kuoni weren’t the only company offering this (or a similar) tour around Peru. We looked at a few others but we chose the Kuoni tour because, as well as being the cheapest, we knew from past experience that it would be very well organised. This 2-week long tour was almost our most expensive holiday to date - nearly as much as our month long tour of Australia! This was surprising, since Peru turned out to be quite a cheap country. We didn’t find out what it was that made the tour so expensive. It was possibly the longhaul flights as Peru isn’t served by many airlines from Europe so they are probably not very competitive.
The Peru tour lasted 2 weeks and visited many of Peru’s diverse tourist attractions. Our tour package included all of our transportation, entrance fees, guides, porters, hotels, breakfast each day and about a third of the other meals. There were 38 people in our tour group which we think was too large particularly at the places where we only had one local guide. Fortunately, our group was divided between two guides at most of the locations we visited (all except Lima, Arequipa & Ica). The hotels that we stayed in were all of a very high standard indeed (with one very obvious exeption in the Amazon jungle which you will read about later). Overall, our tour was very well organised by Patti. Just about everything seemed to be done for us - all we had to do was stick to the fairly generous schedules whenever we were allowed to wander around by ourselves. We had the evenings to ourselves on most days, which allowed us to explore on our own, sample the local cuisine and generally unwind together or catch up on some much needed sleep. The tour wasn’t too intensive but it did involve some very early starts including two at 3:30am! We are usually plagued by unnecessarily early group alarm calls when we go on these organised tours. We always ask for a “lie in” to a more reasonable time - like an hour before departure but we have never prevously managed to escape these early alarm calls - even unplugging the phone doesn’t work as someone will usually come and knock on the door as well! However Patti took our quest for extra sleep as a personal challenge and became the first tour manager to block us from every one of the group’s alarm calls - Thanks Patti!
We have shown our tour route on this illustrated map of Peru. If you are interested, you can view our itinerary by clicking here. Alternatively, you can follow the link below to begin your virtual tour of Peru in Lima. |
(Click on any of the pictures to view a full sized version)
