Spend the night in the valley below so you can be among the first through the gates as the clouds drift off Huayna Picchu. With a local guide, you walk the terraces and temples of the Inca citadel and run your hand along stones fitted so precisely that no mortar was ever needed.

South America's first luxury sleeper train carries you from Cusco toward Lake Titicaca, climbing above 14,000 feet past grazing alpacas and snowcapped peaks. You watch the high plains roll by from the observation car, then sleep in a cabin as the train crosses the roof of the Andes.

Families have harvested salt here since before the Inca, channeling a single salty spring into thousands of terraced pools that glow white and pink down the hillside. Nearby, the great circular terraces of Moray step down into the earth, each ring holding its own microclimate.

Belmond's elegant train follows the Urubamba River as the valley narrows into cloud forest. Brunch is served at your table on the way in, and on the ride home there are pisco sours and live Andean music in the open-air observation car.

At a weaving cooperative in this highland village, you watch wool washed in suds from a grated root, then dyed in pots of plants, flowers, and cochineal. The women weave on backstrap looms, and every pattern carries the story of the village it comes from.

Quechua communities above Pisac care for more than a thousand native potato varieties, in every shape and color you can imagine. You dig a few with a local farmer, then sit down to a pachamanca, a feast of meats and potatoes slow-cooked under hot stones in the earth.

Virgilio Martínez's Lima restaurant was named the best in the world in 2023. Each course carries you to a different altitude of Peru, from the Pacific seafloor to the high Andes and down into the Amazon.

In Lima, ceviche is a lunchtime tradition, made with fish caught that morning. You stroll Barranco's murals and colorful mansions, cross the wooden Bridge of Sighs, and settle into a cebichería for a long lunch and a perfect pisco sour.

At dawn, you wait in a blind deep in the Amazon as hundreds of parrots and macaws gather on a riverside cliff to eat the mineral-rich clay. The air fills with color and noise as they descend in waves.

From a small expedition riverboat out of Iquitos, you explore one of Peru's largest reserves by skiff. Pink river dolphins surface beside the boat, and monkeys, sloths, and hoatzins watch from the flooded forest.

On the world's highest navigable lake, the Uros people live on islands they build by hand from totora reeds. On nearby Taquile, the men knit as they walk, keeping alive a textile tradition recognized by UNESCO.

Colca is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. In the morning, you stand at the rim as Andean condors rise on the warming air, their wings stretching nearly ten feet as they glide past at eye level.

Off the desert coast of Paracas, your boat passes the giant Candelabra carved into a hillside and then reaches rocky islands covered with sea lions, Humboldt penguins, and thousands of seabirds.