3-5 months before you travel

We booked our flights in January this year (2015) for September. So quite a long time in advance, but I don’t think flight costs really go down in recent years.

The flight was approximately £550 each. With British Airways, with a connection at Madrid airport. But it actually turned out to be Iberian Air from Heathrow > Madrid. Then LAN from Madrid to Lima, the capital of Peru.

Book internal flights.

We Booked an internal flight from Lima to Puerto Maldonado (where we joined our jungle tour with Rainforest Expeditions). This flight was also with LAN airline. It cost £127.50 each, so not exactly cheap. Plus it was a nightmare to book on the LAN website! They took the payment but didn’t send any confirmation! It took ages to sort out on the telephone. In the end we had to get a refund for that booking direct with LAN as it didn’t work (and Santander bank were useless and didn’t care at all!). But the re-booKing via Skyscanner, then an agent called Tripsta worked fine.

We also had a flight from Perto Maldonado to Cuzco, this was with Star Peru and cost $93 each (approx £50).

Book your Machu Picchu tickets early too, as there’s a capacity of 2000 tickets sold each day. We opted to go for the ticket that included  Huayna Picchu, the mountain at the back of the Machu Picchu site. So glad we did! It was incredible! There’s only 200 tickets available for Wayna Picchu (Hyayna Picchu) a day, so they sell out fast.

You have a choice of a 7am time slot (which we took and we’re glad we did, as it was cooler and quieter at this time) and a 9pm toke slot (we were really glad we didn’t opt for this time slot as coming down we saw it was much busier and much hotter on the descend).

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Peru research takes lots of wine!

1 month before travel

We booked all our hotels once we knew where we needed to be on which day. A mixture of Booking.com and Travel Republic.

1 week before you go

Print out all your paperwork and go through it in chronological order.

72 hours before you go

Check in online for your flight(s) and internal flights if possible. The best window seats go fast, as we found out on there return trip.

One of our train tickets, for the return trip from Machu Picchu to Ollyantaytamo station couldn’t actually be printed out as they didn’t email it to us. But this was easy enough to sort out as they have a small office at Lima airport, just past the Security area. The staff member was helpful and printed the ticket out for us, but you have to present the exact credit or debit card you paid on. Here’s a pic of the Peru Rail office…

Peru Rail ticket office at Lima station

Peru Rail ticket office at Lima station