Bucket List Trip to Peru & Ecuador - Part 1

At the beginning of 2020 we had a trip to Peru and Ecuador with our daughter all mapped out. Well, we all know what happened in 2020. Covid put the brakes on all travel. Five years later, we finally got to make this trip. With the original trip we had planned everything on our own. This time we booked through HX Expeditions so they arranged everything except for the post trip that we selected to go to the Amazon.

CLT Airport

We left Charlotte on November 21, flying first to Miami and then on to Lima. Our daughter was able to fly directly to Lima from Los Angeles, and she arrived in Lima about forty minutes before us. However while she breezed through customs, we had an hour and a half wait in an extremely long line. And this was at 11:30 in the evening!

After collecting our luggage, we headed outside to wait for our airport shuttle. We had decided to stay at the Holiday Inn by the airport since we were getting in so late. The hotel where we would join our group was about an hour away from the airport. After a few times of up and down curbs (no ramps), the handle broke off my large suitcase. This was not a good way to start a trip that was going to be filled with many changes in lodging over the course of two plus weeks. We finally checked into our hotel at 1:45 in the morning.

Following breakfast the next morning we took a cab to our hotel, the AC Hotel by Marriott Lima Miraflores. Fortunately they had our rooms ready, so we dumped our suitcases and headed out to explore the area. There was a mall area nearby, and we found a nice place to have lunch. Later we booked a van tour of Lima. There were only two other people in our group - a man from India and a woman from Jamaica. 

Lima November 22nd

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel before meeting up with our tour group. I think there were about 31 of us for this portion of the tour. We were transported to the airport for our flight to Cusco. One thing I didn't like about this tour is that we were just given our boarding passes right before getting on the plane. I was not seated with the rest of my family, which I didn't like. The seats were three across, so it should have been easy to keep us together.

Once we arrived in Cusco we had a short transfer via bus to the Hotel Palacio del Inka, where we had lunch. Cusco sits at over 11,000 feet above sea level, and we were lucky in that aside from a mild headache the first day we did not suffer from any other altitude sickness side effects.

After lunch we did a half day tour of the city, including the Santo Domingo Monastery, the archaeological site of Sacsayhuaman, the Sulca Textile House Museum with their animals, and Cusco Main Square. Then it was time to rest up for the next day's trip to Machu Picchu.

Cusco