Hello Peru! (with stop in Mexico)

This will be Our Second major trip together, the first was to Hawaii; that was a family trip that doubled up with our wedding, but that is for another post. Right now this is all about Peru and a little bit of Mexico! Number one in our bucket list (Peru), we explored the idea of Peru from many angles, Bryan’s mom is a travel agent, and she has a friend that all he does is organized trips to Peru and its highlights.  So, we roughed out a desired Itinerary that he redlined as almost impossible to achieve.  Then, a dear cousin of mine that is a Pilot (he is been all over the world more than once) found out that we were going to Peru and he called me to give me some tips and pointers, and thanks to him we decided to change the strategy because at difference with other destinations.  Peru is one of the few that needed to be planned in almost every detail.  This is how we ended up organizing it and what we discovered along the way.  The first thing we discovered was that if we were planning on going to Machu Picchu that we needed to reverse engineer it.  We had to find out if the  dates that we were planning to climb Machu Picchu had tickets available, because the Peruvian government only allows a small amount of people in Macho Picchu and only half of those are allowed to climb Huayna Picchu.  Also, we needed to check if there were train tickets to takes us to Machu Picchu and back to Cusco (you can check the tickets to Machu Picchu here www.machupicchuterra.com  and the train tickets here Incarail)  we got the tickets 3 month prior our trip and there were like 20 tickets left, so if you are planning something like this keep that in mind. Once we figured that there were tickets for both then we planned everything around that, we also discovered that it was cheaper to fly from Home to Mexico city and then to Lima, Peru, than a ‘direct flight’, well ‘direct’ is a ridiculous statement, let’s just say that the ‘direct’ flight to Lima was in some airlines 16+ hours trip with a stop in Canada (go figure!). So since most of my family lives in Mexico and Bryan hasn’t really seen the real Mexico, we decided to spend a few day there as well.  It helps that I (Laura) speak Spanish.  I was able to organized it really easy, made a few phone calls to Peru and their tourist department, some hotels and several tour companies, made a few friends like that and connected with what seems to be better deals with 3 interesting tours that we wanted to do. The first in Puno around lake Titicaca, the second in the Secret Valley from Cusco to Ollantaytambo and then an Amazonian tour in Iquitos. I was really aiming for Puerto Maldonado, but we discovered that Iquitos was a better deal, was more economic, had more variety and it was on the actual Amazon river. In a way we were a little disappointed because we really wanted to go with no plans on this adventure, but due to the nature of the terrain and the government limitations, we needed to plan everything in detail. We also discovered that to be able to see the best of Peru we needed to fly from place to place otherwise we would have spent hours on the train or bus and loose so much time in transit, we are short of time for this trip and we needed to get the best out of it, so after a lot of planning and calling our Itinerary looks like this:

Day 1

• Flight from home to Mexico City
• Then bus to Cuernavaca

Day 2

• Visit Taxco and the archeological site of Xochicalco a few kilometers away from Cuernavaca
• Back to Cuernavaca, shower and get luggage, back on the bus to Mexico City at night to be able to flight out at 5am to Lima.

Day 3

• Flight from Mexico City to Lima (5am to 3pm)
• Visit the Miraflores barrio in Lima and stay in hotel.

Day 4

• Flight from Lima to Juliaca (Puno)
• Tour Lake Titicaca w/ a private tour

Day 5

• From Amantani island to Juliaca airport
• Flight from Juliaca to Cusco
• Cusco in the afternoon

Day 6

• Private tour thought the Secret Valley from Cusco to Ollantaytambo
• Train from Ollantaytambo to Machu Picchu (4pm)
• Sleep in Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu town)

Day 7

• Climb to Machu Picchu (6am)
• Climb the Huayna Picchu (11.45am)
• Back to hotel, shower and get the train back to Ollantaytambo and bus to Cusco
• Cusco hotel

Day 8

• Cusco

Day 9

• Flight from Cusco to Iquitos
• Tour in the Amazon

Day 10

• Tour in the Amazon

Day 11

• Morning amazon tour and boat ride to Iquitos to the airport
• Flight from Iquitos to Lima
• Hotel in Lima

Day 12

• Flight from Lima to Mexico City
• Bus from Mexico City to Cuernavaca

Day 13

• Teotihuacan
• Coyoacan
• Back to Cuernavaca

Day 14

• Tepoztlan
• Cuernavaca

Day 15

• From Cuernavaca in bus to Mexico city airport
• Fly back to Home.

Please keep reading for a detail layout of the adventure!