A complete guide to travel in Peru

Technical or specialist subjects in Peru.

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Travel is almost always more enjoyable when one has some object in mind - perhaps to fish, perhaps to record church music, perhaps to try regional cuisine or to cave-dive. Many have interests such as birds, butterflies, orchids and the like. Click here to start and here to stop a long recording of the birds in a Peruvian tropical swamp.

Peru is blessed with extraordinary biodiversity, based on its equally diverse physical geography. There are few places where one can watch marine life at breakfast, stand in snow with a picnic lunch at 5000m and spend the night in humid jungle.

To understand this, one needs to understand the physical geography and geology as well as the climatic factors which shape life in the Andes.We have provided guides to these issues, including stand-alone sections on the geology and climate of the Andes, their ecology, the extraordinary birds, insects, orchids and the like which one finds everywhere.

 An elaborate facade on a sixteenth century church in the Cordillera Huayllas, central Peru.

All this may sound a degree academic, but we do not expect everyone to read everything. Nevertheless, when you are interested in something, you want facts in detail, and this is what we try to provide.

In addition, therefore, we have written factual guides on banking and money, costs and tipping, shopping and bargaining, dress and eating habits, sexual attitudes and how Peruvians have fun; on mobility and the many other practical issues that confront a traveller.

However, superimposed over all of this is the variation in human experience, from the arid coastal deserts to the freezing thin air of the altiplano; from the humid mists of the ceja de selva to the deep slow rivers and ceaseless humidity of the deep selva. Here, as indicated elsewhere, we have provided in depth texts covering the history, society, religion and economy of the country.

A range of the Cordillera Blanca in central Peru
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