Medium Programs
These medium length itineraries are designed to give the traveller with around two weeks an in-depth experience of the different regions of Peru and its neighbouring countries in all their diverse aspects.
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A brand new destination to Machupicchu. Nestled in the transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon, Machu Picchu was the capital of a lost province of the Inca empire which appears to have been planned, constructed and abandoned in a period of less than a hundred years. Eight Inca roads converged on the sacred city, conquering a wild and vertical landscape, and it is along these ancient highways that we will hike to the most emblematic archaeological site in the Americas. From snow capped mountains down to the cloud forest great views, excellent birding, photography.
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The first is a non-trekking week in the Andes and the Amazon. From the imperial city itself we travel to the Sacred Valley, with its colourful markets and scattered ruins of temples and palaces.
We journey by train to Machu Picchu, following the course of the sacred Urubamba-Vilcanota river as it plunges into a narrow gorge to lose itself in dense tropical montane forests.
From Cusco, we fly to Puerto Maldonado for the three hour trip upriver by motorized canoe to our lodge deep inside the famously biodiverse Tambopata National Reserve.
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Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhere near to that fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on Earth.
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4. TREK PERU
( 9 days 8 nights ) PER09
The programme takes us into the heart of the Inca empire as the ancients themselves travelled: on foot. Leaving Cusco, we trek to Machu Picchu along the Inca Trail, part of a network of five hundred year-old roads linking several satellite settlements lost until quite recently in the dense forests around the sacred city, once the capital of a densely-populated Inca province.
Our trip ends in the Sacred Valley, where the Incas a legacy of magnificent religious comlexes and summer palaces, and their ancestors in the village of Willoq retain many of their forefathers’ ancient customs.
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Isolated from the ocean since its coastline was annexed by Chile in 1880, Bolivia is South America’s least known and least visited republic.
Land-locked Bolivia is a stunningly beautiful country characterised by dramatic extremes.
North of La Paz, a single road climbs to the snow line before plunging into the tropical montane forests of the Yungas.
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Nestled in the transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon, Machu Picchu was the capital of a lost province of the Inca empire which appears to have been planned, constructed and abandoned in a period of less than a hundred years. Eight Inca roads converged on the sacred city, conquering a wild and vertical landscape, and it is along these ancient highways that we will hike to the most emblematic archaeological site in the Americas.
Beyond Machu Picchu lies a region which the Incas were never able to dominate. The Amazon basin is the most biodiverse region on Earth. The extraordinary altitudinal range between lowland rain forest, cloud forest and elfin forest has created a varied habitat like no other, home to one-third of the world’s 8,600 bird species and 1,200 hundred species of butterfly, as well as endangered mammals such as the jaguar and giant river otter.
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Lima, once the seat of the viceroys of Greater Peru and known until the middle of the 20th century as the Garden City, is the starting point for this trip which ends in the world’s highest de facto capital.
Along the way we visit the erstwhile capital of the Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo, with two full days to relax and explore independently its narrow Pre-Columbian streets lined with Inca masonry and crowned with colonial baroque architecture, before making the spectacular train journey through the Urubamba Gorge to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley.
Lake Titicaca forms the southern border between Peru and Bolivia, and we will visit islands belonging to both nations as we cross the world’s largest tropical lake by modern catamaran.
La Paz, set in a hollow and sheltered from the cold winds of the Bolivian altiplano, is a bustling city of street vendors and open air markets, lapping busily like tidal waters against the gleaming skyscrapers of its downtown business quarter and overshadowed by the snow-crusted peak of the “King of Kings”, Mount Illimani.
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