(This is the first in a series of blog posts on the South American countries I visited between January and June, 2022, though not in order).

I can see why everyone likes Peru. I really like it, too. It has an enormous variety of scenery and geography, the food is terrific, there is a lot of very good budget accommodation, transportation is plentiful, everything is cheap, and the people are very friendly, relaxed and, for the most part, calm and polite. Best of all for me there are a lot of chances to explore out-of-the-way places hidden in the mountains and jungle where there are no tourists.

It’s a close call indeed, but I have to say Peru is my favorite South American country so far, all things considered.

Getting In and Out

I entered Peru overland from Ecuador on March 29. I hadn’t planned on going to Ecuador (but, oh man, am I ever glad I did—more on that later) but realized it offered a handy way of going between Colombia (where I was) and Peru (where I wanted to go). Flying to Lima, the capital of Peru, (as I’d been planning), means you arrive in the country half way down the west coast; I wanted to see places in the north of Peru so it made more sense to enter overland from Ecuador in the north than to huff it all the way back up from Lima, and doing so gave me a chance to dangle my toe in the water in Ecuador.

The journey from Cuenca, Ecuador to Jaén, Peru entailed a three day odyssey across the most treacherous and terrifying mountain roads I’d ever been on (you’ll have to wait for my Ecuador blog post for that story) but it put me into Peru right in the northwest mountains where I wanted to be, in the city of Jaén.

Entry was straightforward enough. I had to show my passport, and my vaccination certificate proving I’d had three shots against Covid-19. There was no requirement to show a negative PCR test result, health insurance, proof of onward flight, accommodation booking or anything else. At the first desk in the tiny immigration office a woman checked my temperature and my blood oxygen saturation level (sticking one of those things on the end of my finger), and asked me if I had any symptoms or felt unwell (I didn’t).

The immigration officer, also a woman, asked me how long I planned to stay in Peru and what my plans were (I was planning to stay around one month but told her 60 days, just to be sure I got enough time). She was very friendly and efficient and welcomed me warmly to her country. Instead of a stamp in my passport I was given a printed receipt with all the relevant entry information, the sort of slip of shiny paper you get when you use your credit card at a shop. Then I was in Peru.

My Route

I stayed in Peru for 34 days. I started in Jaén then traveled south to Chiclayo on the coast. From there I went south on the Pan-American highway to Trujillo, then turned northeast to Cajamarca. From there I spent three amazing days taking the back road to Chachapoyas via Celendín and Leymebamba. From Chachapoyas I traveled north into the Amazonas region to Tarapoto, then farther north to Yurimaguas at the end of the road. From Yurimaguas I took a cargo boat for three days and nights to the great inland city of Iquitos. After an outstanding 6 day stay in and around Iquitos I flew to Lima and continued back south on the highway through Ica and Nazca to the colonial city of Arequipa. From there it was north to Puno and Lake Titicaca, then southeast through Desaguadero into Bolivia.

Getting Around

I traveled entirely on public transportation, usually buses, small buses, minivans or shared cars, and I hitchhiked a few times (I hitchhiked a lot more in Bolivia). Overall I had no problems finding rides, though it took some work. Very few towns in Peru have central bus stations, so you have to figure out which buses go where, and you have to find out from where they depart. Minivans and shared cars usually leave from specific intersections, behind markets, or at highway junctions, but you’re not from that town so you don’t know that, resulting in a lot of time asking questions and snooping around. If you don’t speak enough Spanish to ask questions about times and locations (or to understand the answers) you’ll have real trouble figuring it out.

Some of the roads, especially the ones through the mountains, are dangerous. Rough gravel and dirt is the norm, and routes are often not cut terribly convincingly into the sides of very steep mountains and cliffs. Buses and vans are not particularly well maintained and the drivers go like maniacs. I made a point of finding particularly small and less traveled roads, which added another level of questionable safety; overall you get a terrific sphincter workout traveling on the roads in Peru. If you’re a nervous passenger, or get easily motion sick it might not be the place for you.

Three Regions of Peru

Peru, as Peruvians are fond of telling you, consists of three regions: Costa, Sierra, y Selva—the coast, the mountains, and the jungle. People identify themselves and their culture as belonging to one of those regions, explaining that they’re coastal people, or jungle people, or mountain people. I got the idea the concept is similar to people in Canada telling you they’re from the north; they don’t really mean they live at an address with a northern postal code, they mean that they’re from the north, they’re of the north, where being from the north means something different than being from other places.

I can’t say I was able to absorb the subtle nuances in culture associated with the different regions all that well, but I absolutely did see and identify many of the differences. You’d have to be in a coma not to. The coast is flat, hot, extremely dry and largely empty. The mountains—well, they’re not just mountains, they’re the Andes mountains—are magnificent to look at and are home to the Peru of people’s imaginations, with llamas and ladies in funny hats, indigenous villages hidden in crags and valleys, and Inca ruins like Machu Picchu.

Being from the jungle means you’re from the Amazon rainforest region, the majority of it in the huge province of Loreto, Peru’s biggest, a vast expanse of rivers and lakes and flooded grassland and thick green swathes of forests and bush. I visited all three regions though spent the majority of my time in Peru in the mountains.

The Coast

The coast is largely flat, brown, dry desert (though with terrific beaches). Most of the coastal population is clustered around the Pan-American highway that runs through the entirety of Peru, from the border with Ecuador in the north all the way to the border with Chile in the south. The Pan-American highway itself, except for a small stretch of undeveloped rainforest between Panama and Colombia (known as the Darién Gap), runs uninterrupted 30,000 kilometers from Alaska to the very tip of South America. There’s a road trip for you.

Lima is more or less in the center of Peru, snuggled up against the Pacific ocean. The other three significant cities along the coast are Chiclayo, Trujillo, and Chimbote (I got to Chiclayo and Trujillo but not Chimbote). Lima is by far the largest city on the coast as well as the largest city in the country with nearly 12 million people; the second largest city in Peru, Arequipa, has just 1 million.

Trujillo and Chiclayo are the third and fourth largest cities, so the majority of Peru’s population is centered on the coast. Despite that the coastal road appears empty and forlorn when you travel on it, a black-blue ocean on one side and endless flats and brown dust on the other. Enormous buses travel up and down making it very fast and easy to move north or south, unlike in the mountains where it takes ages to travel even short distances.

Lima is interesting and has the muscle and grit which I like in big urban areas, but it’s not my favorite of the Latin American cities I’ve visited (that honor still goes to Mexico City). It doesn’t have quite the variety you’d expect for a place so large, and much of the historical district is rundown and ratty. It was an extremely important financial and administrative city for the Spanish during their colonization of Peru, (starting around the middle of the 16th century until 1821) and it must have been glorious back in the day, with its grand boulevards and magnificent plazas and gardens. Several sections of the historic centre have been refurbished and are well maintained, but there are very large sections of the city that are derelict, dirty and dangerous, which is a shame as the city has tremendous potential to be a real gem of colonial architecture and charm.

Most of the Lima residents who were able moved to the safer, more affluent southern areas of the city such as Miraflores and Barranco. I visited those areas too; they’re very pleasant and tidy, and much safer and wealthier than the central areas, but also a little boring and predictable. 

Trujillo is very attractive, with beautiful colonial architecture and leafy squares and plazas. It’s much more approachable than Lima, but doesn’t have the gristle and muscle of the capital. Chiclayo, the other coastal city I visited, is largely unattractive and rough, though the historic centre is really beautiful and the people are friendly and outgoing. I had an excellent evening in the pub in Chiclayo, chatting with new friends (until one guy got so drunk he wasn’t able to chat any longer, and I went home).

The food in Lima—in Peru on the whole, actually—is outstanding. The country has an international reputation as a foodie destination, but I imagined the good stuff would only be available in the large cities, but I was wrong: meals in even simple family places were excellent, uniformly fresh and inventive. I didn’t eat anywhere fancy or expensive but didn’t really need to as I was getting such good meals eating in the normal Mom & Pop places I like. 

The Mountains

In many ways Peru is the mountains. The big, important cities are on the coast, and the jungle and Amazon rainforest region hold the most biodiversity and territory, but it’s in the mountains where you find all the magic. The highland villages and towns of Peru are special places.

There you can see the indigenous people and see how they go about their daily lives. The Spanish colonists for the most part only bothered with places where they found gold and silver, and on building transportation networks to move their gold and silver to ports and warehouses. Other regions were of limited interest, and they largely left people alone (other than to take them to work as slaves in their mines and ports and warehouses). As a result, much of the highland area of Peru is still very traditional. It’s a region of stunning mountain roads and little hamlets tucked into hidden valleys.

Traveling in the mountains as an independent backpacker is extremely adventurous and rewarding, but it’s tough work. Roads are in various states of repair, ranging from excellent, well-surfaced smooth roads to gravel, mud and rock monsters you’d be hard pressed to get your dog to walk over. Towns are far apart. It’s cold and there’s little to no tourist infrastructure. No one speaks English. I moved about on public transportation, sometimes in a small bus, but more often in minivans or shared passenger cars. On some journeys I estimated we traveled around 15 to 20 kilometers an hour on average (which is still very fast on some of those mountain roads), turning a 200 kilometer trip between towns into an all-day marathon where we banged, slammed, and slithered our way along the road for hours. I hitchhiked a few times, which was easy, slightly safer, and gave me a good chance to chat with drivers and practice my Spanish.

Food was available when we passed through towns, either at basic roadside restaurants or from food vendors, usually women and girls who sold water and pop, sandwiches, boiled eggs, empanadas and bananas.

Traveling in the mountains brought joy and magic, but it also brought terror. Roller coasters and amusement park fun rides are nothing compared to some of the Peruvian mountain roads. Most are only wide enough for one-way travel, and they twist and turn and drop and rise constantly. All the drivers I saw were men, and they must think the zombie apocalypse is just behind them and gaining all the time, because they drive like crazy people, seemingly undeterred or unaware of any danger. Twice I was in a van where a few of the locals threw up, and there was always a good deal of genuflecting and worried whispering. If you get car sick easily, forget it.

Only once did I witness a Peruvian passenger ask the driver to slow down. I did, though, on several occasions, explaining that I had a wife and child at home (I actually don’t), trying to make a joke of it but hoping to give what I thought were compelling reasons why I didn’t want to die on a Peruvian road. “If I die you’ll have to call my wife and tell her,” I warned. The drivers always chuckled and nodded their heads but rarely slowed down. I’m writing about it in a light way but, in all honestly, I don’t think I’d drive again on some of the routes I traveled, no matter how interesting the towns are. Peru does have a history of violent protests and government coups, and there’s malaria, dengue, cholera and other nasty diseases in the Amazon regions, and you always have the chance of getting food poisoning, but I would say your greatest danger traveling in Peru would be road accidents.

I did note, however, that many of the roads would make for excellent long distance walking routes, but that’s for another day.

The Jungle

The word for “jungle” in Spanish is selva, but selva can also mean “forest”, and “rain forest”. When Peruvians refer to the selva they mean something that’s sort of a mix of all three. Selva refers to a geographic region, an environment, and a way of life and of identifying yourself all at the same time.

Peruvians were very quick to point out the differences in people and culture of their fellow countrymen from places not in the selva. “He’s not from the selva so he won’t really understand,” was something I heard a few times. There are covetously guarded opinions as to which places are more selva than others. For instance, the town of Tarapoto markets itself as the gateway to the selva, but people from Yurimaguas, 125 kilometers north of Tarapoto, were very quick to assure me that Tarapoto, while officially belonging to San Martín and located in the upper reaches of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest province, is not really much of a selva place—selva lite, if you like—and I shouldn’t consider anything that happens in Tarapoto as uniquely selva-like. I’d just nod my head. It all looked jungly to me.

What no one disputes as being part of the selva, however, is the Amazon river. When you see the brown, silty waters of the big river marching stately past rustic wooden houses propped up on stilts, and see the indigenous locals paddle their canoes alongside the banks set against an impossibly thick curtain of deep green forest it’s hard to imagine anything other than selva.

On the River

I spent three unforgettable days and nights aboard the Eduardo X (ten) cargo boat chugging from Yurimaguas to Iquitos, first on the Huallaga river, then the Marañón river, and finally the Amazon. It was a real highlight of the trip. I was a little worried about it to begin with, as the Eduardo is not a passenger boat that takes a little cargo, it’s a rough, rusty working cargo boat that takes a few passengers. There are no cabins or dining areas and nowhere to sit, just a large half-open deck where you string up your hammock, and a small kitchen that distributes very basic food to crew and passengers (I had to bring my own bowl, spoon, and mug). The toilets have no seats, and the shower is a spigot above the toilet that jets out brown water pumped up from the river below. I loved it every minute of it.

The crew was busy, but there was nothing for passengers to do but watch the day drift by. There were 5 other foreigners: two Frenchmen, a Spanish man, a Serbian man, and a Colombian woman. All other passengers—I counted twenty-four—were Peruvian. I bought a hammock and rope, a bowl and mug, drinking water and snacks at the market in Yurimaguas the night before we sailed. We stopped—or just slowed down—several times to allow residents of small river communities to buy and trade with us. Locals paddled or motored out to our boat to sell fruit and drinks (I think homemade alcohol or beer), and to buy chickens and other supplies.

Three very basic meals a day were included. We had sweet, runny porridge and white bread for breakfast, and boiled chicken and rice or simple stews for the other meals. I brought along a small packet of instant coffee and sweet-talked the cook into giving me boiled water each morning. There was no chance to buy anything else en route until we got much closer to Iquitos on day 3 and stopped a few times at small hamlets where we could buy water, potato chips, bananas and a few other snacks. Total passage cost 120 Peruvian soles, or about $29.00—a bargain.

Seeing the many small hamlets and communities alongside the river, and sleeping in a hammock, gently swaying as the big diesel engines chugged along through the night was terrific, and it gave me a taste for river travel. There are a lot of rivers in the Amazon region; Brazil has the lion’s share, but there are many others, some huge, in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia. A person and his hammock could spend months drifting up and down from place to place.

People

According to a 2019 survey there are about 35 million people in Peru, nearly 26% of whom claim to be indigenous, mainly Quechua people. 60% of the country identifies themselves as mestizo, that is, people of white and indigenous mixed race. There are other indigenous groups, such as Aymara and Afro-Peruvian, but to my (admittedly untrained) eyes nearly everyone I saw, particularly in the mountains and selva, looked Amerindian. Many of the big cities are very Spanish in flavor, the way the public plazas and churches and fountains look, but in general most of the people don’t look like they come from pure Spanish or European stock.

In the mountains you hear a lot of Quechuan spoken. Many older people I spoke with obviously—it was obvious even to me—spoke Spanish as a second language, and not necessarily all that well. Larger towns and villages have a colonial square or central plaza with a church and fountain and a few buildings with porticoes and faux gas lanterns that present a Spanish flavor, but there’s nothing otherwise particularly Spanish about the place. Most of the women wore traditional dress and hats and spoke Quechuan.

People are for the most part very relaxed and quiet. Peru is no stranger to protests and political upheavals, but when I was there all was calm, though there was a large protest one night in Lima (sadly about a block away from my hotel), something to do with teachers, or a union or some such thing. But it was peaceful and fairly well organized.

It was easy to approach locals to ask for directions or to chat with them, but it was unusual that people approached me with questions or initiated conversations. It was obvious that family life is important, as in most other Latin American countries; there are a lot of kids and young people, and it was common to see families promenade in the evening with an ice cream cone or gather in a restaurant.

Overall the Spanish spoken in most areas of Peru was easy enough to understand, depending on the topic, though I found the Spanish in the Amazon region fast and casual which made it a little tougher to gather what people were saying. There are a lot of regional variations, too, and dialects. Everyone seemed able to understand my Spanish, though I make plenty of mistakes when I speak. Overall my Spanish improved a lot on this trip.

Favorite Places

Forced to choose, I’d pick Cajamarca, and Iquitos as my favorite places in Peru, with Puno coming in a close third.

Cajamarca and Iquitos are very different from each other: Cajamarca sits at 2,750 meters in the Andes mountains and looks and feels like a traditional Andean mountain city. It’s large (nearly 300,000 people), and is very busy and active during the day, but quiet and sleepy at night. In recent years the city has experienced a high rate of immigration from other provinces in the region and elsewhere in Peru, mainly due to the gold mining boom at nearby Yanacocha, about 45 km north of town, though all the expansion is on the outskirts of town. People are calm and polite but shy and reserved, and largely indigenous.

The layout is very typical of nearly all towns in Peru: there’s a central Spanish-looking plaza where you find a church, a few colonial administration buildings, plants and flowers and a few blocks radiating from the central plaza that are now shops and offices but would at one time have been homes of Spanish merchants and officials. Wander a half dozen blocks away from the center and everything looks “South American Modern” (my label), red cinder block construction is the mainstay of contemporary buildings. All through the town you’ll find a mix of elegant but aging Spanish buildings, modern concrete offices, cinder block houses, mechanic’s garages, grocery stores and small parks and squares all jumbled together.

The real highlight of Cajamarca is its main market, cleverly named “Central Market”. It’s one of the most interesting markets that I’ve seen in Latin America, mainly because it’s so unorganized and scattered. There’s an actual market building, covered with small stalls and shops like other South American markets, but the activity spills out into the nearby streets and keeps going in all directions making the market section of town completely chaotic and colorful. There’s a terrific selection of fruits and vegetables and fish and meat in the official stalls (including Guinea Pigs), but on the streets are large numbers of local indigenous people, mainly Quechuan speaking women, selling everything you can imagine, often with their wares just set out neatly on a blanket or tarp on the side of the road. It’s very noisy.

Amazingly my hotel was right smack dab in the middle of all the action, and it was excellent, clean and tidy and very cheap. I normally steer clear of hotels near market areas because they tend to be noisy and sometimes a little rough, but the Hotel Los Gladiolos was a real find. I ended up staying in Cajamarca for five nights and spent the days wandering the streets and trekking in the hills that surrounded the city. I saw very few foreign tourists.

Iquitos

Iquitos is the capital of Maynas province, and sits on the Amazon river in northeast Peru in the heart of the rain forest. It’s a truly unique place, and unlike anywhere else I’ve been. Actually that’s not true: it’s a little like a lot of places I’ve been, all mixed together, which makes it special. It’s hot and humid and there are chocolaty brown rivers and palm trees and exotic birds so it looks and feels like Southeast Asia, but it’s also easy to imagine you’re in parts of East Africa, or in India.

There is a lot of Spanish colonial architecture and leafy central plazas, so it also looks and feels a bit like Mexico, or Colombia. There are very few cars (more on that later) but a million motorized rickshaws, so it looks and feels a little like Bangladesh. And there are other looks and feels that are much harder to put your finger on. The people are more forward and zesty than in other places in Peru, giving Iquitos the feel of a real frontier, semi-wild place. Which it is.

With a population of a little over 500,000 people, Iquitos is the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road, accessible only by river and air. I arrived onboard the Eduardo X after three days and nights swaying in my hammock chugging up the Amazon, and flew out to Lima after spending 6 nights in Iquitos. There’s nowhere to go by road, which is why car ownership is so low. That, and the fact that 99% of all goods and supplies have to arrive in Iquitos by cargo boat, making things more expensive than in other regions.

Iquitos is there because of the great rubber boom between 1880 and 1914. Along with Manaus, downriver in Brazil, Iquitos was an important center for the production of rubber, attracting Europeans and other South Americans from far and wide. Each group brought their own ideas and norms, giving Iquitos a really mixed-up and spat-out sort of feel and appearance.

I loved it. The markets are extremely colorful, the people chatty and vibrant, the city looks interesting because of the lack of cars, and there are terrific places to sit out at night near the river where you can drink-in both the atmosphere as well as a cold beer.

One neighborhood of Iquitos, Belén, in the southeast area of the city, is particularly fascinating. It is home to some 65,000 people, most poor, and many of whom live in extreme poverty. Housing is very ramshackle, most of it without clean water, proper sanitation or electricity. Flooding is an annual problem, as the district sits right on the flood plain of the Amazon and Itaya rivers.

I know all this because the people of Belén are extremely chatty and friendly and were very surprised to see me, so talked and explained their neighborhood to me. Much of what I read online advises strongly to stay well away from Belén as it’s supposed to be dangerous and cut-throat, so people are not used to seeing foreigners wandering in their neighborhood, (the smarter ones stay away, I guess) and as a result are very chatty and curious (and, as it turned out, very friendly and welcoming, though I was warned by a number of people to be careful).

I spent two very interesting mornings wandering around Belén but don’t have many photographs because I left my camera at home on those days, just in case the neighborhood lived up to its reputation (I was fine, and so was my camera).  

There are many very small communities on the Amazon river close to Iquitos where I made interesting day trips, traveling in large motorized canoes with a handful of surprised though welcoming and friendly locals. A person could spend weeks in Iquitos, wandering around the city and visiting the nearby villages and jungle. I’d go back for sure.

Puno

Puno is my third favorite place in Peru. It cuddles right up to Lake Titicaca at 3,830 meters in the high Peruvian altiplano on a bleak, cold, windy plateau. It’s not particularly attractive, as most of the town is made of crude red cinder blocks and brick, but it has a definite buzz about it, and is visually stunning because of the colors and shades produced by the high altitude.

Puno is the last main place overlanders pass on their way from Peru to Bolivia when taking the southern route. The northern route to Bolivia starts in Cusco and uses a different border near Copacabana. It’s the more popular of the two options, especially with the younger backpacking crowd who take the overnight tourist buses (and often arrive with fewer possessions than they started with; theft is very common on overnight buses), but I wanted to see Puno so chose the southern road. I stayed for two nights before setting off for Bolivia and loved walking in the nearby hills and wandering through the markets. It was cold at night, down to zero (Celsius) when I was there.

Covid-19

Peru was hit hard during the pandemic. The health system there is as you might expect from a developing country where, generally speaking, wealthy people have access to excellent health care, middle class people have reasonable access to reasonable health care, and poorer people—the majority— have access to lousy healthcare, or no access at all. I tried to find what I thought to be reliable data for the number of Covid related infections, hospitalizations and deaths in Peru, but the numbers are all over the place, so who knows. Anecdotally I know from talking to people that Covid hit them hard.

Everywhere there were signs of public health measures taken during the pandemic, such as hand-washing stations and notices telling people to social distance, wear masks and stay home when sick. Covid prevention was hit and miss when I was there, mostly miss. I saw at least some people wearing masks in every town and city I visited though, oddly, in some towns nearly everyone wore a mask, in others nearly no one. I quickly got the idea that mostly everyone had come around to a “been there, done that” attitude about the pandemic. Some people still worried about it and took precautions, but most everyone else had moved on. No one ever told me to wear a mask or asked me to wash my hands.

Restaurants and bars and shops were all open and things seemed very busy.

Accommodation

It was easy to find places to stay in Peru. Even the smallest towns had at least one hotel, or some sort of government “rest house”. Most places were very tidy and clean, though fairly spartan and modest. I stayed in a couple of dumps, but overall hotel rooms offered excellent value for money. On average I paid around US$10.00 – $14.00 a night for a modest though clean and tidy room. I never paid more than $23.50 and in fact found that a 25% larger budget rarely resulted in a room that was much better, usually you just got a place with a TV, air conditioning (unneeded in winter) or a telephone.

I used Booking.com and Google Maps to find hotels, then normally contacted them outside the apps to make bookings. WhatsApp is king in Peru, and nearly all hotels, businesses, people and shops have a number, usually easy to find. The price was sometimes a little lower, but I normally had a lot better service and more flexibility contacting hotels directly. Most were small and family owned.

Food

The food situation in Peru is exceptional. Peru is known as a foodie destination, and while most of the fancy recognized places are in Lima and some of the other bigger cities, I found food in casual family-run places all over the country to be excellent. There’s a tremendous variety of dishes.

Set-menu lunches in particular offered good value: a meal of soup, rice, salad, some sort of main course like fish, or stew, a drink and sometimes a small dessert cost no more than two or three dollars. There was an enormous variety of extremely high quality fruit and vegetables available in the markets, sold at ridiculously cheap prices. The variety of climatic zones in Peru means you can find all sorts of fruits, not just tropical things, but also apples, pears, apricots and peaches.

It was very difficult finding good coffee. I was surprised. I can buy excellent Peruvian coffee beans in the supermarket in Vancouver, so I expected Juan Valdez and his coffee-laden donkeys to be wandering the streets of Peru but, alas, it wasn’t the case. Drinking coffee is not a traditional thing in Peru. They don’t have a “coffee culture”, and outside of the big cities it doesn’t appear to have caught on, at least not outside the home. Apparently only around 6% of Peruvians drink coffee (so says Wikipedia), and all their good beans are exported.

Peru is the world’s biggest exporter of fair trade coffee (by quite a margin, actually. Honduras comes in at number two) and coffee makes up Peru’s largest single crop, but you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t read it.

I was to find out later that the coffee scene in rural Bolivia is worse, and nearly non-existent in Paraguay.

People

It’s hard to generalize as Peru is quite large, and there’s a lot of difference from region to region, but in general I liked the Peruvians and found them cheerful and relaxed, very courteous, calm and easy to deal with. Peru is no stranger to demonstrations and protests, sometimes violent, but I never saw anything like that when I was there. I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly positive I was never cheated or overcharged.

Customer service in shops and (especially) restaurants was quite good; shop keepers are polite and efficient. At the same time Peruvians were not overly forward or “too friendly”, (like in India, for instance), so I was never pestered, followed, or stared at, even in the most rural of rural places. I rarely got anywhere near any sort of tourist area (with the exception of central Arequipa and Puno) so never had to deal with touts or shop owners who try to lure in unsuspecting tourists, and even in those places there wasn’t much real pressure.

Costs

It depends on what you do and where you go, of course, but in general Peru is a cheap travel destination for independent backpackers. I spent about $25 per day on average over the nearly 5 weeks I was there, for everything, which is cheap by anyone’s standards. If you doubled your budget you could stay in better places and hire the odd private car and driver. The value for money in Peru in general across all sectors is very good. Away from the tourist areas it’s not a luxury destination by any means, but it’s not rough, dangerous or full of hard work. If you’ve done some of your own independent travel in non-first world places you’d find it fairly easy and trouble free.

Next up on the blog post list is Bolivia. Bolivia and Peru are in some ways quite similar, but there are significant differences as well, which I’ll try to describe. It’s a breathtaking country, and I have some good pictures to share, even if I do say so myself.

Stay tuned!

* Remember! I love receiving comments, but anything you write, including when you hit “Reply” to the email notifications, is public. You know who you are…

* If you liked this story why not read some of my other blog posts? They’re all  here.

* The photographs in this post, as well as many others, are all here.

* If you liked this post, why not subscribe? Sleep easy knowing you’ll never miss another story. Click on the “Follow” button, or contact me and ask to be put on the list.