Today we headed home. Like every part of this trip, it involved a long car ride – in this case, we’re expecting to take about four hours to drive from our hotel to Arequipa Airport, going from high in the Andes near the Colca Canyon down to a mere 8,500’ elevation.

In years past, we always shopped for souvenirs and gifts. At some point, we didn’t want any more stuff for ourselves, we never had the luggage space to bring home lots of gifts, and we generally didn’t want to spend our vacations shopping. But when something pops up unexpectedly and it looked like it wouldn’t take much room, we occasionally would acquire it.

We picked these up at the floating islands on Lake Titicaca.

In addition to the driving, we had almost three hours at Arequipa Airport before departure, a four hour layover at Lima Airport, an eight hour flight back to New York which landed at 9:00am, and finally the usual wait for our checked bags and over an hour to drive home. Door to door, 23 hours. But we got to sleep on the plane 🤨.

So how was this trip?

I had a good time. We got to see and do a lot of things we’d never seen before: three nights the Amazon River, two days climbing through Machu Picchu, higher elevations than either of us had ever experienced, and for much longer than we had ever experienced, many really great hotels and a couple of merely good ones, lots of amazing, friendly and helpful people in our guides and drivers, and all of the hotel and restaurant staff we interacted with.

We’ve been to Pikes Peak (14,115’) for about an hour, where I suffered from the altitude. We’ve been to the Jungfrau in Switzerland (13,642’), also for an hour or so, where I suffered. I’ve been skiing at 10,000’, and the first days were hard. But we were well above 10,000’ for all or parts of 11 days. The first few days were very difficult, both from shear lack of oxygen to fuel, well, everything, and from the symptoms of altitude sickness. We started taking Acetazolamide while we were still on the Amazon, and my altitude symptoms faded after a few days.

During our drive to Arequipa, we stopped at the highest elevation we have experienced: 4,910m or 16,109’. At that altititude, you are getting only about 55% as much oxygen as at sea level (4). We definitely felt the altitude – it was with us all the time, especially while climbing at Machu Picchu or even walking uphill or up two flights of stairs to our room at Titilaka (3).

We had one really big problem during the trip, and one small one. The big one was having to take two flights and drive two hours to Titilaka for reasons that are still fuzzy to me. That turned a long day of looking at mountains and scenery into a long day of sitting in airports and airplanes.

The smaller one was the screwup with our room at Rio Sagrado, where they put us in a really small room by mistake (haha), until we complained and our guide got involved. In addition to bumping in to each other all the time the one night we were in the small room (1), it meant yet another day of packing and unpacking in a trip that made us experts at that activity.

But those were accidents, and stuff happens on a trip this complicated. The structural problem was a bigger deal: too many moves, too many times packing and unpacking, no down time to relax and enjoy several of the excellent accommodations we had or even to see the area we were visiting. Our last four stops went like this:

• May 19, 9:30pm: Check into Rio Sagrado.
• May 20: repack and change rooms.
• May 22, 9:30am: Check out of Rio Sagrado, 45 minutes to train, then arrive at Machu Picchu and check in at 1:00pm, then MP visit at 1:30-4:30.
• May 23: Two MP visits until 1:00pm, train to Cusco 5:30-9:15pm, check into hotel about 9:30
• May 24: start packing at 11:00pm to leave early tomorrow.
• May 25: Check out of Montasario 6:30am, flights @ 8:30am and 1:15pm, drive 2:15 to Titilaka, arrive 5:30pm
• May 27: Check out of Titilaka 9:00am, drive to Las Casitas in Colca Canyon arriving at 3:00pm
• May 29: Check out of Las Casitas 11:00, drive 4 hours to Arequipa airport, fly to Lima, midnight flight to JFK, arriving 9:00am, then drive home.

I’m exhausted just writing it down. Only three days of this eleven day stretch did not involve packing and unpacking. Now clearly, we knew what the schedule was before we left, but we didn’t realize how long the transfers were, and of course, the extra “move” on May 20 and the flights rather than drive on May 25 only made things worse (5).

We’ll learn from this. Next trip, fewer and longer stops, and fewer total days (6).

We saw lots of llamas and alpacas, and Sally got to feed some baby alpaca. We also saw vicuna and guanaco, the wild ancestors of the domesticated llama and alpaca.

Sally would say that her favorite part of the trip was the Amazon cruise. She built the trip around it, and was not disappointed.

I’m not sure what my highlight would be. The hotels were, by and large, very comfortable and the service was excellent. I liked the two cities (Lima and Cusco), and I liked driving through the mountains.

I will say the biggest surprise to me was that I could actually get a clear picture of a bird in flight. I’d like to say it was my skill, but I’ve done nothing to practice that craft. I have to give credit to the unbelievable subject tracking ability of my camera (2), combined with the size of the birds, and how relatively close they were.

One Day of the Condor, May 2026

As far as the stuff I actually brought, I used pretty much everything as planned – no extra clothing, no extra camera gear, just a few emergency medicines which I’m glad we didn’t need. We wound up with three carry-on sized suitcases, knowing we would have to check at least one but unwilling to risk loosing stuff with all the transfers. In hindsight, the checked bag should have been a little bigger – it would have made the packing easier, and the bags we kept with us easier to move.

But overall, it was a great, if exhausting, trip.

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(1) I usually rather enjoy bumping into Sally 😁.

(2) For the geeks amongst you, I was using an OM Systems OM-1 Mark II with a 40-150mm f/4 lens. I had to watch 40 hours of YouTube videos to get it setup properly; the instruction manual for this camera is 568 pages.

(3) Who thought a multi-story hotel with no elevator was a good idea at 13,000’ ?

(4) When we were at Lake Titicaca, our guide measured our blood oxygen at 70% and 75%. I don’t believe these measurements; we would require hospitalization at those levels.

(5) The care required to pack for a car trip is different than that for flying – you can just throw stuff in the trunk rather than have to fit it in your suitcase.

(6) Sally’s suggestion: exactly one stop.