Peru

Our feelings about Peru - country full of beautiful places

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11/05/2015

We traveled Peru within 20 days in total. We visited beautiful, mysterious and interesting places. And we also had the opportunity to meet many people. Thanks to travelling Peru we gained many experiences and now we would like to share our feelings about Peru with you.

Infrastructure and transportation

Peruvian roads are nice and most of them are relatively new. The main problem is the maintenance. There are often big rocks and stones on the roads and the guard rails are ridiculous – it is like not having them at all 😉
Overall the road network is very qualitative and you have no issues to get anywhere.
What is worse are railways. In many town you can see surplus rail corridors but no trains at all.
Air services are very well functioning but are rather more expensive therefore you may prefer to use buses. They are excellent way of transportation in Peru. We mainly recommend Cruz del Sur, Oltursa or Exclusiva companies. But be careful Peruvians have no idea how to treat your personal belongings so without asking you they simply pin the paper code on your luggage and do not care they depreciate something that is yours.

Safety

Peru is a safe country. We never had a feeling someone wanted to rob us or treated us really rude.
On the other hand some “services and goods offers” were always at the peak of the propriety limit. In our opinion this was actually worst in Peru from all countries in South America we have travelled.

People

Based on our experience the poorer person, the more kind and honest he or she was.
As an example can be restaurants for locals where you can eat for a very small amount of money. Everybody tried to communicate with us and they never ripped us off like they do it to tourists normally. 😉
Absolutely different experience we had with middle class Peruvians, we were very disappointed by them. Everybody was playing a friend but in fact all they wanted was to get some money from you. They did not steal the money but offered us services and wanted to rip us off on that. The worst it was in Cusco.
If you meet a street vendor trying to sell you anything (they try hard all the time and are really annoying), be careful about addressing you as Amigo (friend). We found out that it means in translation something like a “walking wallet”. J At least this is one of our feelings about Peru. But what is really interesting – they do not make money only on gringos (white strangers), they also do not hesitate to rip off people from Chile, Bolivia and so on.
People in Peru are very small and white tall gringo like Pavel was an attraction for them. If you are more than 170 cm tall pay attention at public places like toilettes, etc. because they are built only for small people (we call them hobbits).
And we did not miss one small detail. When we stayed with one of our Couchsurfers we noticed he had fish at home. And we have never seen fish at any house in South America. He explained us that Peruvians are superstitious and having an aquarium at home brings bad luck. 😉

Food and drinks

Food in Peru is delicious and especially if you go to small and cheap stalls located at market places.
Going to expensive restaurants is not worth. They do not offer you fresh and nice meals.
In markets you can often have the menu – it consist of soup, main course based on daily offer and after that they give you tea or juice. This all costs 5-10 PEN (cca 1,6 – 3,2 USD), it only depends what town you are in.
Among the meals we really liked belongs Lomo Saltado (onion, tomatoes, pork meat and French fries), Saltado Tallarin (onion, tomatoes, pork meat, pasta usually spaghetti), very delicious is fried trout (Trucha in spanish) and also fish called Ceviche (served cold with lime-onion dressing).
The big challenge is then fried or baked guinea-pig (Cuy al horno) or bull tale (Guiso de rabo). Guinea pig tastes like rabbit.
If you do nto want to drink the tap water we recommend you to filter it. Everybody does it in case they do not buy packed water.
Very good and cheap drinks are fresh juices called Jugos. You can get them at local markets. You can choose from the menu or make your own choice from ingredients they offer. The only thing we recommend you is to ask them to mix your drink with milk or orange juice but never with water because they do not guarantee you water was filtered. Same applies for drinks with ice-cubes!
And you have to try Chicha morada drink made of the black corn. It can be alcoholic and non-alcoholic.

Prices

The big curiousity was a fee we had to pay at every bus station. They told us it is a fee for them that they let us leave from there.
Prices of goods, food and drinks in supermarkets (the big modern ones) are really high therefore it is useless to cook.
What you can buy really cheap are big washing machines, refrigerators and kitchen-stoves. 😉
Admission fees, tourist service fees and everything related with tourism is overpriced! Tourist segregation exists in Peru. Example: You go to Machu Picchu by train. Are not local? You pay 1500 % more for the train! When we asked them for the cheap train and ticket they answered that we need to pay for they excellent service (=one coke on board). Honestly we do not like this and we publically with to all Peruvians to experience the same discrimination when travelling.

Environment

In one word Peru is beautiful. You may find here everything you like. Majestic mountains, large lakes, tremendous plains. Travelling in Peru is a great experience.
On the other hand you will probably suffer from the high altitude sickness. Therefore we recommend you to eat or drink coca. Or buy Sorojchi pills that are very effective and can be better than coca. You get them at every pharmacy.