Sacred Valley · Peru · 7 days
Seven days, eight seats, one host who has lived in this valley for ten years. We start low so the altitude does not flatten you, work through the empty megalithic sites in the right order, and finish at Machu Picchu with everything booked and timed for you.
Most weeks in the Sacred Valley are a coach, a queue and half an hour at each stop. This is not that. We run eight people, a private vehicle, and a route built around sites that are world-class and almost always empty.
You spend the days looking at the stone and asking the questions. We handle the tickets, the train, the driver, the oxygen and the licensed guide where the rules need one. By the evening there is good food and a proper talk about what you saw.
Day by day
We collect you in Cusco and drop straight down to the Sacred Valley floor, about 600m lower, where the air is easier and you actually start to acclimatise. Settle in, eat, sleep. No sites today. The mountain sets the pace, not the schedule.
An easy one to start. Pisac stacks ceremonial stonework above one of the biggest Inca cemeteries anyone knows of, thousands of tombs cut into the cliff across the gorge. We read the masonry, then drop into the market while you find your altitude legs.
The Temple of the Sun. Six slabs of pink rhyolite dragged from a quarry on the far side of the valley, hauled up here, and left half built. You can still see the tool marks and the joins. This is where the questions get serious.
A short walk in from the parking. No thirty minute hike, whatever the guidebooks tell you. Inside a cave there is an altar and a false door cut into solid rock, done with a precision that shuts people up fast. Most days it is just you.
The best one. A megalithic site as good as anything on the tourist circuit, carved niches, water channels, a huge worked outcrop, and most days there is nobody there. No queue, no ropes, no half hour drive-by. We stay as long as it is worth.
Up to Cusco for the giant walls of Sacsayhuamán. Blocks over 100 tonnes set without mortar, joints you cannot get a knife into. Then Qorikancha, where the Inca foundation outlasted the cathedral they built on top of it.
We handle the train, the bus, the timed entry and a licensed guide so you walk in clean and spend the day looking up instead of queuing. The famous one to finish a week of the ones nobody talks about. Also the only crowded site we visit, and we plan around that.
A $500 deposit holds your seat. Balance due 60 days before departure. Full payment must clear 14 days before you travel.
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