Machu Picchu & Lake Titicaca

A late-afternoon landing and a straight run into Miraflores, the district Lima built along the cliff edge above the Pacific. The clifftop is a chain of parks the length of the neighborhood, with paragliders working the updraft off the face. The evening is open on purpose: two nights at sea level make Cusco, two miles higher, much easier.

A guided day through Lima's historic center, laid out by Pizarro in 1535 and run as the capital of Spanish South America for the next two hundred years. Then the Larco Museum and its five thousand years of Peruvian gold, ceramics and textiles. The evening is the Magic Water Circuit, where the fountains in the old city park run to music after dark.

Cusco sits at 11,150 feet, so the first few hours are yours to settle in and the sightseeing waits until afternoon. It starts at Qoricancha, where the Spanish built a church straight onto the Temple of the Sun, then climbs to Sacsayhuaman, the fortress above the old capital, with the whole city open below. Last is the little lookout fort at Puka Pukara, out where the road turns down toward the Sacred Valley.

A full day down into the Sacred Valley, which runs lower and warmer than Cusco. The morning is Pisac, market stalls filling the square and Inca terraces curving around the hillside above it. Then the stone stairs at Ollantaytambo, the one place the Inca turned back Spanish cavalry, by flooding the plain below the fortress. Back in Cusco by evening.

The train follows the Urubamba down into the gorge, where the mountains close in and the cloud forest starts. The bus climbs the switchbacks above the town, and the whole site is suddenly in front of you: temples, plazas and terraces cut into the ridge between two peaks. Machu Picchu was built as a country estate for a single emperor and stood empty within a century of his death. The night is spent at the foot of the mountain, because tomorrow starts with a climb high above the ruins.

A self-guided climb, on whichever of the two peaks your dates allow. Huayna Picchu is the peak standing behind the ruins in every photograph of them: a steep hour of Inca stairs to 8,920 ft, looking straight down on the city. Machu Picchu Mountain is the longer, steadier climb to 10,111 ft, with the whole valley below. The afternoon is the train back to Cusco, running up the valley beside the river most of the way.

The road south out of Cusco climbs all day. At Andahuaylillas an adobe church is painted floor to ceiling. At Raqchi, the temple to Wiracocha carried the largest roof the Inca ever built, and its wall is still standing. The high point is La Raya at 14,200 ft, higher than anywhere else on the trip. Puno is on the lake shore by evening, at 12,421 ft.

Nothing today happens on land. The Uros islands come first, mats of totora reed laid over blocks of root, soft underfoot and rebuilt from the top as the underside gives way. The Uros moved onto the water to put distance between themselves and the people on shore, and never came back. Taquile is further out, terraced from the shoreline to the summit, where lunch comes with the lake below you and the men do the knitting. You are back in Puno by late afternoon.

Sillustani stands on a peninsula in Lake Umayo, on the road out to the airport at Juliaca. The chullpas there are funerary towers, and each one has a single low opening facing east, so the dead faced the sunrise. Then the flight to Lima.