nine nights in peru, one guide, one vehicle, altitude taken slowly
A Private Sacred Valley Vacation Package Across Nine Nights, Valley First
This is a private sacred valley vacation package built around altitude. Your party gets one guide and one driver for nine nights, and nobody else rides with you.
Nine nights, from $3,890 per person.
Nothing here counts you and nothing here follows you off the page. One word can be written down, and only the word yes, so this strip stops coming back. What that means in full.
Cusco airport sits at 11,150 feet. The valley floor at Urubamba sits at 9,420. That gap of roughly 1,700 feet is the entire logic of this itinerary: you land, you get in the vehicle, and you go down, not into town. The drive takes about an hour and fifteen minutes over the Chinchero pass, and most people sleep the last twenty minutes of it.
A private sacred valley vacation package spends its first four nights on that lower floor. You sleep at 9,400 feet while your body does the work, and you see the valley properly instead of treating it as a day trip out of a city you have not adjusted to yet. Then the rail, then the citadel, then Cusco at the end, when 11,150 feet no longer means anything to you.
The reason this office builds it in that order is straightforward. Altitude sickness is dose and rate, not fitness. Fit people in their thirties get it. The itinerary that flies you in and puts you at 11,150 feet on night one, then marches you around a cathedral at 2 p.m., produces a headache by dinner and a bad night after it, and there is nothing to do about it except lose the next day.
- What size this is
- The smallest size we sell: the guide and the vehicle belong to your party alone, which is why the per-head figure is the highest in the catalog and why the day can change at breakfast.
- What is actually included
- Nine nights lodging in the valley and the high city, room type by level and season; a licensed Peru-registered guide for eight touring days; a private vehicle with driver, fuel and parking; all site entry tickets on the itinerary, including the timed-entry citadel ticket and its circuit; the valley-to-citadel rail seat and the shuttle road up; breakfast daily and four lunches; airport pickup and drop in Cusco.
- Who else is on it
- Nobody. Your party is the group: two people, or six, and the guide answers only to you. There is no other family waiting in the van, no roll call, no seat you have to be back in by 2 p.m. The cost of that is arithmetic, not luxury: one guide and one driver bill the same for two travelers as for twenty, so two people carry the whole day between them.
- What it does not include
- International and domestic airfare; dinners and five lunches; drinks with any meal; tips for the guide and driver, which are customary and typically run $25 to $40 per day for the pair; laundry; the second citadel-mountain climb permit if you add one; oxygen or clinic visits if altitude turns bad; anything to do with insurance, visas or passports, which sits outside what this office does; single-occupancy supplement, quoted separately.
- Who should not book this
- Anybody who wants the least costly way to see the valley: this is the most expensive shape it comes in, and forty people on a coach see the same stones. Anybody who cannot walk two hours on uneven stone with steps and no handrail. Anybody flying in and out in five days, because the whole design is nine nights of slow ascent and it does not compress.
What one guide and one vehicle actually change
The honest answer is not "personal attention." It is the clock. On a fixed group departure the day is a contract: the van leaves at 8:00 because eleven other people agreed to 8:00, and the salt terraces get fifty minutes because the schedule says fifty minutes. Your party alone means the guide can say, at breakfast on day three, that the weather has turned and Moray reads better in the afternoon, and then that is what happens.
The second thing it changes is the hard day. Ollantaytambo's terraces are a climb: roughly 200 steps of uneven Inca stone, no handrail on the upper flights, at 9,160 feet. That day sits on the schedule where it can be moved. If somebody in your party is sleeping badly or eating nothing, the guide moves it, swaps in the lower town and the water channels, and takes the terraces two days later. On a coach that day is fixed and you either climb it or sit in a cafe.
The third is language and pace inside the sites. Twelve people around a guide need a raised voice and a semicircle. Your party needs neither. You can stop at one wall for fifteen minutes and ask why the stones on the left are cut differently from the stones on the right, and nobody behind you is waiting.
from $3,890per person
- Where it comes from
- The lowest figure this office has actually booked this trip at inside the last twelve months.
- Read as
- Two people sharing one room, unless the rows above this say otherwise for your case.
- What lifts it
- A smaller party than the size this trip is filed under, a better grade of room, a peak week, and a late decision.
- When it stops moving
- When an operator puts its own name under it in writing. Until then treat it as the floor of a range this office has seen.
Whatever you settle is settled with that operator, on whatever system it runs. No part of it passes through this office and no card is ever seen here.
The months that work and the months that fight you
Two seasons, and the split is sharp. Dry runs May through September: cold clear nights, dust, hard light, and the highest visitor numbers of the year at the citadel. Wet runs November through March: green valley, warm afternoons, and rain that arrives most days between about 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. and stops. February is the month this office will talk you out of, because the main trekking route closes for maintenance and the rain is heaviest.
Timed entry at the citadel means your circuit and your hour are fixed in advance and cannot be swapped on the day. That single ticket is the one part of a nine-night private plan that is not flexible, and it is booked first, before lodging.
- May to June
- Dry, clear, cold nights near freezing on the high plain, strong visitor numbers
- July to August
- Peak season and peak crowding at the citadel, lodging at the top of its band, book far ahead
- September to October
- Shoulder: dry enough, thinner crowds, best value on the private vehicle
- November to January
- Wet season proper, afternoon rain most days, green terraces, lowest figures
- February
- Main trek route closed for maintenance, heaviest rain, this office suggests another month
- March to April
- Rain easing, rivers high and brown, very quiet at the sites
What confirmation locks and what it leaves open
A private plan holds fewer things in place than a group one, but the things it does hold are absolute. The citadel ticket carries your names and a circuit number and it will not be reissued for a different day. Rail seats for the valley-to-citadel leg go the same way. Lodging and the vehicle are yours and can flex. Below is the order in which this desk moves.
- FigureYou send party size, month and rough level of lodging. The desk returns a written figure in two to four working days, with the per-person cost broken out so you can see what the private vehicle is carrying.
- Ticket firstOnce you accept the figure, the citadel entry and circuit and the rail seats are bought against your passport names. This fixes one day of the nine. Everything else is still open.
- Lodging and vehicleRooms in the valley and in the high city are held, the guide is assigned by name and the vehicle is sized to your party. You get the driver's and the guide's names before departure.
- Day planAbout three weeks out the desk sends a day-by-day plan showing where the hard day sits and which two days are deliberately empty so it can move.
Tell the desk who is coming
Party size is the first number that matters here, because it divides one guide and one vehicle rather than adding to them. Two people and six people pay very different per-head figures for the identical nine nights. Send the size, the month you are thinking about, and whether anybody in the party has been above 9,000 feet before. A message is read the same working day.