Planning Your Time

Depending on your interests, Lima [1] can be seen in a day’s dash or several days to take in most of the museums, churches, and surrounding sights.

Peru travelers tend to enjoy Lima more at the end of a trip than at the beginning. After visiting Puno [2], Cusco [3], and other Peruvian cities, travelers are more prepared to deal with the logistics of getting around this huge city.

They have also seen enough of the country to make better sense of the vast, and often poorly explained, collections in Peru’s museums.

If you are short on time and are visiting Cusco, one headache-free option is to fly from Cusco to Lima early in the morning and spend the day touring Lima on an organized tour. Various good day tours include lunch at one of the better restaurants in the city. In the evening, you can head to the airport for your flight home.

This is also a good way to avoid a long layover at Lima [1]’s unpleasant airport. Because of afternoon winds, most flights leave Cusco [3] in the morning. But from Lima, international flights tend to leave in the evening. So travelers coming from Cusco often end up spending several hours at Lima’s airport on their way home.