I just returned from Peru driving from Lima to Cusco as per my above itinerary approximately. It's PERFECT do-able and it's NOT really NOT dangerous to drive. That's a myth from the past. Really.


Correct; but they do this daily at random times and then it opens the same day again. When I was there last week this just happened after I visited. Convento is under re-construction but interiors you can visit. The plaza armas actually was awesome last week; NO CARS!


Yes it's really restricted. There are 4 routes. Of which 3 and 4 kind of go together with either mountain. 1 and 2 are partly the same but 2 is more long.
plan very much in advance! Or take the Belmond train as it includes the ticket already for any of the 4 routes. :-) The train is 500 USD one way; but you have entry for sure............

Coming from the Philippines, driving in Peru would be a piece of cake (just kidding hehe).


Thanks for sharing your experience! It was different from the day we visited (last Monday). They confirmed a full-day closure and would only open late in the afternoon the following day (Tuesday). It looks like full-day closures would be more common this week, but obviously, nothing is guaranteed. I am hoping that when we get back to Lima, I'd have the same experience as yours.


Just arrived in Cusco. Will share later on the experience of purchasing the MP tickets.

Breaking news: I saw that the Ministerio de Cultura has opened the online ticket sales this evening and was able to book MP for 30 Aug. Yay!

I realized I didn not share my thoughts on driving in Peru, so I am fixing it right now. I were there in June and drove 5700 km on my own in a rented car, mostly in the mountains. Fantastic adventure, although it must be honestly admitted that it is not the easiest country for drivers. But there is no tragedy, the freedom to move at your own pace and get (almost) where you want is priceless.

I rented a SUV, which I recommend to everyone, because it gives a lot more confidence on Peruvian roads with holes. When doing the Gringo Trail, you will drive almost 100% on asphalt, although holes (some very deep) can appear quite often in this asphalt.

I went far beyond the Gringo Trail, I was on a route where I did not see asphalt for almost 3 days, covering a total of over 400 km with an average speed of about 20 km/h (more on that in my review of Rio Abiseo National Park). On such roads, even an SUV is not enough, you would need an off-roader or pickup. On dirt roads, I destroyed most of the plastic underbody covers, fortunately the tires and metal elements remained intact throughout the trip.

Driving in cities is quite slow and not very pleasant - the streets are narrow, often one-way, and the traffic is large. Lima is a separate category, the city has, in my opinion, badly designed roads, it lacks a bypass and this causes huge traffic jams that cannot be avoided.

Driving in the dark is problematic because drivers constantly abuse long lights. And when it comes to lights, Peru is a slow American, you can have powerful headlights, lights flashing in different colors, etc. Fortunately, you can educate Peruvian drivers a bit, after blinking they usually changed to short lights.

Serpentine fans will feel perfectly in Peru, on a record day I counted 114 of them. Altitude amplitudes can also be extreme, on a record day we started at 2800 m above sea level to climb 4740 m above sea level. and end the day at sea level. The Cuzo-Hidroelectrica route also burns - on the way we enter 4300 to end at around 1600. Getting to Machu Picchu is a separate story, since May 2002 the road access is severely restricted and it is even more recommended to take the train.

Gasoline is quite expensive, and interestingly sold by gallons. Usually 95 gallons cost 22-25 soles. Car washes are ridiculously cheap, I used it twice and, for example, for a comprehensive washing of a terribly dirty car inside and out, I paid only 20 soles.

To sum up - Peru is actually a more difficult country to drive than its neighbors (and only in South America I tested driving in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) and most other countries in the world, for me comparable to some countries in the Middle East (Jordan, Iran). But nothing terrible.

By the way - I recommend Enterprise Rental - hassle-free pickup and drop-off. Once, in an extremely cramped garage, I did a medium-sized fender wipe, pointed to a scratch in the rental shop, but they rubbed with paste and did not count anything. Damaged chassis covers also free of charge, although I also indicated them when returning them.

wojtek

Thanks for the advice wojtek! My partner and I would sometimes rent cars when traveling but because I am still recovering from a bad knee injury and my partner has had leg surgery, we decided not to. Your advice would surely come handy for visitors of this site so it's definitely appreciated!

Did some deep research today together with Timo the Timonator on Rio Abiseo. In addition to being very hard to truly visit, it is also poorly documented from a WH perspective (most files are lacking on the UNESCO website). However, I encountered the original nomination dossier and IUCN evaluation at the Peruvian NP website. Have put a link on our site page as well.

The new map of Lima (2023) is rather enlightening for me since it includes new historic sites/area previously not part of the WHS.

I updated my old review of the Historic Centre of Lima with new details about 3-4 historic sites in Lima, which seemingly no one has visited that might increase our rather low rating. This is not a NEW review based on any recent visit, I just updated my rather vague old review with new information I've learned while researching.

Manu National Park and Fitzcarraldo

The Telegraph of 21 Oct 2024 has an interesting article about the Internet reaching the indigenous community of Palatoa-Teparo, said to be in the "Buffer Zone" of Manu NP (actually in what is called the Cultural Zone), and the impact, both good and bad, this is having on the people (the latter includes becoming addicted to internet porn!!). It has been picked up by other publications if the Telegraph version is paywalled. The article set me to investigate the various ethnic groups living around and inside Manu NP. These are allowed "traditional" use of the NP and to live within the "Restricted" and "Core" zones. The latter area is even home for a small number of groups who live there under the Peruvian government's "Uncontacted Peoples" rules which forbids all contact by outsiders with them.

At which point it is necessary to introduce "Fitzcarraldo"! I presume that most readers of this post will have viewed the Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski movie of the same name – if not then you really should watch it in full here . And here is the Wiki introduction to it.

I had always known that the location where the real "Fitzcarrald" had found a short cut between the headwaters of the Urubamba and the Madre de Dios was somewhere "upstream" of Iquitos but without knowing exactly where. Also that the movie was shot in a variety of places within Amazonia but not at the "actual place". In reality Fitzcarrald transported his ship in pieces across the isthmus he had discovered which then became a track for mule trains carrying rubber - unlike in the movie where it was moved as a complete vessel across a somewhat shorter distance! The Wiki article describes these as "Locations used in the film include: Manaus, Brazil; Iquitos, Peru; Pongo de Mainique, Peru; and an isthmus between the Urubamba and the Camisea rivers in Peru (at -11.737294,-72.934542, 36 miles west of the actual Isthmus of Fitzcarrald)". If you feed those coordinates into Google maps you will indeed reach a point a relatively short distance west of Manu NP.

So where was the actual location? This map from 1904 shows it at bottom right. Page right on the display and you will see it in zoom and will be able to to identify that it links the Rio Serjhali with the Rio Caspajhali. Follow the latter downstream and it meets the Rio Manu at a location marked as "antes casa Fitzcarrald"!

If you download the UNESCO map of Manu NP the Rio Caspajhali can be seen top right approaching the border of the "Core Zone"..... and, just beyond that border to the West, is a river going in the opposite direction - It turns out that the Western border of Manu NP actually straddles the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald"! Despite a wide range of searches I have been unable to find ANY article which mentions this aspect of the boundary of Manu NP. The Wiki article on the Isthmus merely states "The isthmus is located between two small river arms, which are in turn tributaries of major river systems: the Serjhali River (a tributary of the Mishagua river, tributary of the Urubamba River,` itself tributary to the Amazon river) and the Caspajhali river (a tributary of the Manu river, itself a tributary of the Madre de Dios River)."

The article also identifies how, after Fizcarrald's first crossing of the Isthmus with his boat in 1896, the entire area became, for a few short years, the location of a "rubber boom" before competition from Malaya resulted in the collapse of World rubber prices and the area returned to nature. As Wiki says "With rubber no longer needing to be shipped, the isthmus route grew over again and is invisible on satellite images as of 2019 – only the two rivers remain visually"

But what the Wiki article about the Isthmus does not describe are the events which occurred at the time of the first crossing and the subsequent impact on the indigenous peoples of what is now Manu NP. This lengthy academic report from 2010 titled "Trouble in Paradise: Indigenous Populations, Anthropological Policies, and Biodiversity Conservation in Manu National Park, Peru" provides fuller details and I quote a few extracts below to give the flavour

"In 1896, the infamous "King of Rubber," Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, employed 200 rubber tappers and a thousand native guides of the Ucayali River basin to portage a small steamship across the narrow land passage, now known as the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald, separating the upper Mishagua River (a tributary of the Urubamba) from the upper Manu River (tributary of the Madre de Dios River), thus opening up a vast region that had hitherto been inaccessible to rubber exploitation and European colonization more generally".

"Accompanied by a flotilla of native guides in canoes, Fitzcarrald's force was attacked by fiercely resistant native inhabitants known as the "Maschos." Fitzcarrald lost 50 men, and in retaliation mounted a vicious counter-attack, killing some 300 Mashcos, burning their houses and gardens, and destroying their canoes. A witness of the fierce battle described the carnage: "You could no longer drink the water from the river because it was so full of the corpses of Mashcos and rubber tappers, because the fight was to the death"

"Punitive and slave-capturing raids known as "correrías" brought dislocation and devastation to indigenous populations who sought to flee the rubber camps or resist intruders. In addition to the violence they perpetrated, rubber tappers also brought new epidemics of exotic illnesses such as malaria, measles, and influenza. Native populations who were pressed into labor in the rubber camps were subjected to poor health and working conditions. Von Hassel estimates that 60% of the native workers in the Manu River rubber camps died of disease or malnutrition"

"Who were the Mashco massacred by Fitzcarrald, who essentially disappeared from the ethnographic record for Manu? Gow (2006), drawing on these historical sources and an interpretation of the enigmatic data concerning the isolated indigenous peoples of Manu and adjacent areas, comes to the conclusion that the Mashco were, in fact, the very same Mashco-Piro or Piro-Mashco, that is to say Arawakan speakers of a Piro dialect. They were massacred by Fitzcarrald's men, and a few survivors fled to the forest, abandoning agriculture and taking up a nomadic lifestyle. Their descendents are almost certainly the enigmatic Mashco-Piro, hunter gatherer nomads who shun all contact with outsiders".

"After 1917, Manu was abandoned even by the Catholic priests who had established a mission at San Luis del Manu. However, the same routes and techniques used during the rubber boom continued to provide indigenous slaves for the hacienda plantation economy, logging enterprises, and domestic service in Peruvian cities at least until the 1950s. Many native populations only managed to survive these grim times by isolating themselves from all contact with peoples outside their group, cutting themselves off from centuries old networks of inter-ethnic trade. Some groups even abandoned agriculture and adopted a nomadic, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle to avoid being detected and captured. Several indigenous groups of the Manu and adjacent regions remain isolated and hostile to outsiders today. Far from the popular notion of isolated indigenous peoples as being "innocent savages," unspoiled by contact with civilization, the isolated indigenous groups of Manu and Madre de Dios regions today are anything but "uncontacted"; instead, they are themselves refugees from the violence of a global economy."

"The Mashco-Piro nomads today are almost certainly descendents of these original occupants of the upper Manu, decimated by Fitzcarrald's attacks and forced to abandon agriculture and enter isolation"

These articles are generally about the Mashco-Piro and conflict with those entering their land (only 1 is specifically related to Manu NP & others can be found!) -
"Peru struggles to keep outsiders away from uncontacted Amazon tribe. Mashco-Piro Indians have been spotted on the banks of a river popular with tourists after increasing logging in the area" Guardian Jan 2012
"Latest death by Indigenous tribe highlights rising tensions in Peru" - Guardian Aug 2022
"Uncontacted' Indigenous group attacks loggers in the Peruvian Amazon" - Guardian Aug 2024

Manu NP is a Natural WHS which is somewhat "special" both in its enormous area closed entirely to tourism and in its relationship with the indigenous peoples who still live there. To me at least it is also interesting to discover just what went on along the banks of the Manu river during the rubber boom of around 120 years ago – the massacre(s), the slavery (a Connection?), the ongoing impact on the "uncontacted peoples" .... and the relationship to a "cult movie"!

Solivagant

I was not aware of Fitzcarrald before this post; he sounds like quite an ambitious but awful character. Coming from the land of robber barons (derived of course from the original European models), I'm amused to learn there was a term rubber baron, too. It seems King Leopold had some competition across the Atlantic for amoral and abhorrent business practices.

I also wasn't aware of Fitzcarraldo, but the movie looks fascinating. Will have to watch it at some point. Thanks for the recommendation!

Though not fully - there was a minor boundary modification in 2009:
"The extension is highly significant because it recognises the lower Manú River basin thereby extending the protection of the entire watershed of the Manú River. The most important lakes in the whole basin are located here. They host several giant otter families, and also harbour an important black caiman population, as well as the largest beaches in the park, of importance for breeding populations of turtles and shorebirds. The area is reported to be home to a small number of indigenous peoples (Mashco-Piro families living in voluntary isolation). As yet there are no land use conflicts in the area from this population and wildlife is largely not impacted by hunting." "The area is near the village of Boca Manú and the communities and settlements in the Upper Madre de Dios. The area is currently the focus for all tourism activity directed at the lowland sector of the park. Tourism is likely to remain focused in this area because it is the most accessible portion of the lowland sector of the park due to its proximity to the airport at Boca Manú. " (IUCN Outlook 2017 says there are 2000-3000 visitors a year)

Yes ...this added area of the "Minor boundary modification" was in the far south east close to the roads down from Cuzco and past places such as Salvacion and indeed Palatoa Teparo.

My comment about "a vast area closed entirely to tourism" related to the hinterland in the closed zone towards the West along the upper Rio Manu as far as the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald for which the addition made no difference and which is indeed "vast" in relation to the areas which can be visited with a permit and organised tour. - and where you visited. Yet much of that, now unvisited, area, and certainly alongside the Manu and Caspajhali rivers must have been a hive of activity, people, trade and rubber camps during the rubber boom. In complete contrast to today's isolation from outsiders. As you went up the lower Manu in the restricted zone did you see or hear of any remains from the rubber era there?

In fact comparing the map of the original inscription in the AB evaluation and that after the "minor boundary modification" seems to show rather more changes then simply the addition in the lower right where Boca Manu is situated - I suspect that is because the later map is based on detailed imaging rather than the "sketch map" approach of the first one!

Thanks for this, I will have a read.


The Herzog/Kinski "partnership" created some really impressive films, and some of film history's most notorious production stories, though the situation around Fitzcaraldo is probably the most extreme. So much so that the documentary of its making (The Burden of Dreams) is something of a classic in and of itself, both come with a Meltwaterfalls recommendation, Burden of Dreams perhaps even more than the film itself.

And just to pick up on your point about Fitzcarrald being an awful character, Klaus Kinski was unfortunatley an approriate person to portray him.

Right will head off and try to compose a Werner Herzog connection now.

We already have Chauvet as "Location for a classic documentary" for "Cave of forgotten Dreams".
Manu of course wouldn't be correct for "Location for a classic movie" as none of it was actually filmed there...... would need to be something along the lines of "Herzog Movie about a place inscribed as a WHS".... but could Chauvet be used twice.....mmmm? If and when Manaus gets inscribed it will be ok for Classic movie from Fitzcarraldo - and Villa de Leyva as well if it ever gets inscribed as a part of "South Of Ricuarte Province" for its role in "Cobra Verde".

I am trying to make a Connection for "Rubber" which would be ok for Manu ......those rubber plantations and factories just don't get inscribed despite the importance of the stuff

An endemic rodent species discovered at Machu Picchu.

https://lesinguliersete.fr/un-tresor-vivant-decouvert-dans-les-ruisseaux-sacres-du-machu-picchu/

https://www.ellitoral.com/informacion-general/incanomys-mayopuma-sorprendente-roedor-carnivoro-recientemente-descubierto-peru_0_vT3q3LYxZn.html

I am visiting Peru end of September/ beginning of October. I have already reserved Machu Picchu. Would it be recommended to reserve Manu beforehand, or is that something to do in Cusco like some reviews are saying? Same question for Nazca-flights and Ballestas-islands.