Travel Review: Tour of Peru, Cusco, Puerto Maldonado, Sacred Valley, Aguas Calientes, Ollantaytambo, Maras, Moray, Machu Picchu

We enjoyed all of our trip! Peru is a diverse country and each place we visited left a lasting impression. The Amazon Basin was amazing. We stayed four days at the jungle lodge, a one hour boat trip up the Tambopata River from Pt. Maldonado. It was cool weather, low humidity, and no insects (really)! Everyone at the lodge seemed to have a great time. In the Sacred Valley, we stayed at the outstanding hotel at the Urubamba. A beautiful hotel with a great young staff and an excellent chef. We had a down day here due to the strike and enjoyed ourselves immensely. This was our home-base for the tour of the Moras and Moray. We traveled to Machu Picchu via the VistaDome and felt that it was worth the extra cost. The countryside is beautiful especially as you enter into the cloud forest. Machu Picchu is awesome mostly because it is ~70% intact and stuck on the side of a mountain. It is crowded and best appreciated with a knowledgeable guide. We hiked to the Sun Gate which rewards you with an expansive view of the city and valley below and, for old folks like us, felt like an accomplishment. We also spent a half day exploring the lovely gardens at Inkaterra Machu Picchu Pueblo and Aguas Calientes town.  Cusco City is a medium-sized city with some very interesting ruins close by, but little remains of the Inca within the city itself. It does have lovely Spanish architecture, is easily walked, and has good restaurants. The San Pedro central market is a must-see and, if you can, book a cooking class. 

In summary, we found the Moras salt pans, the experimental agriculture terraces at Moray, and the store houses at Ollantaytambo as interesting as Machu Picchu because they gave you insight into Inca engineering and creativity and would encourage anyone to visit them. All of our tours were accompanied by a history lesson that put where we were visiting into a proper context--we can't imagine do this without an experienced guide. Our tour guides were courteous, friendly, knowledgeable, well-organized, and took great care in making sure we saw as much as possible.