Tag: Amazon

Must See Spots in Peru

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Peru is a great place to visit as many of the key tourist attractions are so close together! If you need some more Peru inspiration to convince you to visit I suggested taking a look at my Sacred Valley Photo Essay.

As always – I suggest booking your accomodation through Booking.com – I find it always has the widest range of options, best deals and plus you can support me indirectly by booking through them.

Here are the locations that I consider must-sees:

Machu Picchu

You cant take a trip to Peru without seeing Machu Picchu. I don’t even need to explain how magical this place is and in fact I can’t – you will just have to take my word for it and go and see for yourself! See my post of Visiting Machu Picchu for more info!

Perfect view of machu picchu

Arequipa
Arequipa is on my list not because I have been there and loved it but because its the one place in Peru I DESPERATELY regret not going to. I usually make peace with the fact I can never fit in everywhere I want to go but I really regret not visiting Arequipa. It will be my first stop next time I get to visit Peru.

Rainbow Mountain

A mountain that looks like a Rainbow – how much more of a spectacular view do you want? Visiting Rainbow Mountain is like travelling to another planet. See my post on Visiting Rainbow Mountain to see what I mean!

Overlooking rainbow mountain

Paracas

Paracas is views for days – beautiful orange cliffs and sand. It feels like you are in a desert but it’s the beach instead. Paracas is also the location where you can take a boat to see the Ballestas Islands which are filled with wildlife and often referred to as the poor man’s Galapagos. It’s also only a stones throw from Lima so super accessible.

Paracas viewpoint

Huacachina

Huacachina is a backpacker’s dream. It’s a tiny little town just outside Ica, built around a beautiful lake oasis surrounded by desert. It’s overrun with tourists BUT the location is pretty cool and you can take a tour into the desert top speed on 4WD dune buggies and then go sand-boarding down some mega steep dunes. Plus, the town has some major nightlife (like other backpacker hotspots) so after you have had your adrenaline rush you can party all night.

Girl standing ontop of Huacachina sand buggy on the sand dunes

Cusco

Cusco is visited by almost everyone that goes to Peru as its the most convenient jumping off point for the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. However, its a charming town in its own right and worth spending some time enjoying its cool mountain air, wandering its cobblestone streets, visiting its museums and finding surprises around every corner. See my Itinerary: 6 days in Cusco and the Sacred Valley to see how you can fit in some time in Cusco itself into your itinerary.

Girl posing with Cusco traditional women and an Alpaca



The Sacred Valley

Visiting the Sacred Valley is like stepping back in time to the ancient world of the Incas. You can see towns and villages that are little changed from these ancient times and examples of the ancient civilisation at its height including the way the farmed, lived and prayed. See my post Visiting the Sacred Valley for details on how best to visit this rural valley.

Crop circles in theSacred Valley at Moray

Lake Titicaca

The Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca is home to a group of people that live on islands made out of reeds. They travel on amazing reed boats and almost everything on every island is made from reeds. You can take a day trip out to one of the islands or stay overnight! When we went it was really bad weather but still so fascinating to see how different the lives of these people were!

Reed boat on Lake Titicaca

Nazca

Many people believe that the Nazca lines were created by Aliens or were made with the purpose of communicating with aliens. If that’s not enough to peak your interest – then I don’t know what is! Nazca is in the middle of Peru so its pretty out of the way to get to but Peru Hop can help with that. The town has viewing platforms and a small airport from which you can take a 1 hour flight on a small plane to fly over all the Nazca lines (yes that is how big these things are – you can only see them properly from the air.

Flying above the Nazca Lines

The Amazon via Iquitos

The Peruvian Amazon is just a small part of the Amazon jungle but its relatively easily accessible and well-set up for tourists (Well as well as the Amazon jungle can be set up for tourists!). We stayed in Treehouse Lodge, a unique treehouse in the canopy of the jungle and spent our days in a boat on the Amazon river wildlife spotting. See my post Itinerary: 3 days in the Peruvian Amazon for more info on visiting.

Girl hugging sloth in the Amazon

I hope I have inspired you to visit more of Peru and see what this welcoming country has to offer!

Erika xx

Itinerary: 3 days in the Peruvian Amazon

This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to book a stay or purchase an item I may earn a commission at no cost to you.

The Amazon is somewhere that I have always wanted to visit but it definitely pushed me outside of my comfort zone. I am terrified of spiders, hesitant with most bugs and I am definitely prefer a comfortable experience so you can see why the Amazon is probably not my ideal location to be in. As I did not want to miss out on the experience of a lifetime, I compromised with myself and booked a relatively luxury Amazon experience at Treehouse Lodge in Peru. It was a great balance of adventure and luxury.

GENERAL INFO

Getting there and away:

The problem with the Amazon is its very much in the middle of nowhere so its pretty complicated to get to. Treehouse Lodge will pick you up from Iquitos and take you there as part of the package but its still a pretty big journey after getting to Iquitos which is a bit of an adventure in itself.

We were travelling directly from the Galapagos Islands so it was a couple of long days of travel for us. If you are coming from anywhere overseas you will need to spend a night in Lima first as there are not many flights out to Iquitos and limited times that you can be picked up by the Lodge.

If you need to stay the night by the airport in Lima I recommend TUPAC Lima Airport Hostel as it has a nice roof terrace and is very secure. Also you can save some money staying here before you spend such a huge amount in the Amazon!

Our flight to Iquitos took 2 hours and landed at 12:10pm – then once we were collected by the lodge staff you spend another 3 hours almost travelling by a mix of car and boat. However, the boat trip is your first excursion on the Amazon river so its very exciting and doesn’t feel too long at all!

Again, leaving is a long trip so for our 1pm flight back to Lima we had to leave around 8am from the lodge. This is just worth keeping in mind when you think about how long you will be staying as a 3 days/2 nights trip is really only 1 full day. We stayed 3 nights and this was only JUST enough time – 4 would have been better.

Accommodation:

Accomodation here is a real drawcard – you will be staying in an actual treehouse built above ground and connected to the other treehouses and restaurant etc. by a series of rope bridges.

Our room was very comfortable and spacious and it was lovely to wake up in the treetops in the Amazon! However, I would say the place was pretty rundown for the price you are paying to stay here – there were gaps in the mosquito netting and we found a large spider in our room at one point.

Hopefully they have made some renovations and updated the condition of these rooms recently! Im sure the Amazon is an unforgivable place but that just means that frequent upkeep is necessary.

Food:

Treehouse Lodge is all-inclusive (apart from alcohol) and the food was plentiful and excellent! Galavanting around the Amazon makes you very hungry and the chefs here sure do deliver. As an extra special touch the chef cooked up the Piranhas that we caught when Piranha fishing so we could taste them!

Getting around:

Part of the all-inclusive fee here includes having a private tour guide and boat driver to take you on any of the activities that you would like to do. Both were fantastic and we felt very lucky to have such great guides with us – they could spot wildlife from a mile off! My only complaint was that they seemed pretty reluctant to head out in heavy rain and considering we were there in rainy season that limited our time to explore a little bit! They also had a more limited range of activities than we thought before we went (Although we did do a couple of off-book things) – many of the activities were combined into one trip although we could have happily done many of these things twice!

Top Tips:

  1. Make sure to keep the mosquito net around your bed always closed to make sure you have a sleep thats free of creepy crawlies.
  2. Don’t miss visiting the semi-domesticated sloths! A local family rescued a sloth and it has since mated and a whole family of sloths now lives in their house. One or two are so tame that you can hug them and you can watch others chill in the rafters and eat leaves.

ACTIVITIES DURING OUR STAY

The activities that we did didn’t quite match up exactly with the advertised activities. The guide tailors the activities for you somewhat but also in reality you just journey around the Amazon seeing what you can see and fitting in what you can as wildlife doesn’t appear to a schedule and the guides have their own ideas about what may be interesting.

Here are the things we got to do:

Insect Jungle Walk – terrifying!

Birdwatching – so many cool birds but a bit tricky unless you have super binoculars.

Sloth Cuddles – as mentioned above there were Sloth cuddles – they were the best!

Wildlife Spotting in the Canopy – Lots of monkeys in particular!

Searching for the Amazon River Dolphins – these guys are a bit shy so this wasn’t super successful and we spent a LOT of time waiting for them to pop their heads up.

Visit to a local community – they had a large python in a shed out the back of somebody’s house. What a crazy place. I couldn’t lift it it was too heavy!

Weird and Wacky Plants – There were lots of weird and wonderful plants to look at – namely the giant lily pads of Oxbow Lagoon!

Nighttime Cayman Spotting

Fishing for Piranha

Releasing Baby Turtles into the wild – This was only an option due to the specific time of year – the lodge raises baby turtles until they are old enough to possibly survive in the wild and then they are released into the river.

I hope this post has given you some Amazon inspo!

Erika xx