This post details my experience with  PeruHop's 1 day tour from Lima to the Ballestas and Huacachina. I couldn't find the exact tour I took online, but this one is pretty close (and more expensive). I purchased my tour from the tourist information kiosk near Kennedy Park in Lima. It was $119 USD for the entire day.

Here's the important shit: Both the Ballestas and Huacachina are more than 4 hrs drive from Lima. The bus will pick you up from your hotel around 5am, along with all the other passengers from…

If you have been following along, days 7-8 were travel days not worth blogging about. Unless you want to hear my thoughts on shitty airports in the middle of nowhere lol.

Lima is a really nice change of pace from smaller cities of Cusco and Puno. It is proper big city with all of the amenities including American staples such as Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Chili's, etc. My friend Allison and I were discussing how strange it is that exports from America are crappy chain restaurants that we try to avoid when we are…

I visited Taquile Island as part of a day tour that included Uros. You can read about my thoughts on Uros here. Here's what to expect when visiting Taquile Island as part of a tour:

1. Taquile Island is about an hour and a half boat ride from Puno. Because the weather was nice and the island is on Titicaca Lake, the boat ride was pretty smooth. I was told that when the weather gets bad (which it did later in the afternoon) the lake can get choppy and there have been boats that had to stay the night on the…

I visited Uros as part of a day-long tour that included Taquile Island. I would say that after Machu Picchu, my visit to Uros was the most interesting and a must do in Peru. Uros is a collection of man-made floating islands in Lake Titicaca inhabited by native people called Uru. You can read more about their history here. 

I have a degree in Anthropology and even with all my studies of different cultures, I was not prepared for the uniqueness of Uros. These people construct islands made of reeds and live…

I'm not going to talk about each stop on this bus tour because not all of them are worth discussing, but if you are thinking about taking a tour this bus service was comfortable and easy: Turismo Mer- Sun's Route.

The bus left around 7am and I got to my hotel in Puno around 4:30pm. It was quite a long day but the bus itself was pretty comfortable and there were no white knuckle moments like on the bus to Machu Picchu (thank goodness!!). Before starting this tour I know absolutely nothing about any of the…

It's hard to imagine how anything will live up to Machu Picchu once you've been there. But somehow Ollantaytambo and Pisac managed to amaze me in the exact same way.

Ollantaytambo is the town that the Inca Rail will drop you in when returning from Machu Picchu. It's a tiny place that I would not have thought anything about until my guide said we were stopping. There are Inca ruins there that are absolutely worth visiting but that's not what charmed me about the town. Aguas Calientes, which is where most…