Fifteen days from Lima to the Atacama: you climb on day three and never come down

Most flights from Europe and North America land in Lima at night or very early, so day one starts slowly and stays in the old centre, which is compact enough to walk end to end in fifteen minutes.

The Plaza Mayor has been the middle of the city since Pizarro laid it out in 1535, and the four sides do what Spanish colonial squares always do: government on one, church on another, city hall on the third, business on the fourth. The presidential palace changes its guard at a quarter to twelve, with a brass band, and you watch it through the railings from the square.

The cathedral opposite took over a century to finish, which is visible in the building: the front is heavy and late, the interior is a warren of side chapels stuffed with colonial painting. Two blocks north east, the Franciscan monastery is the one to pay for. The library is a beautiful room of oversized bound volumes and spiral stairs, and underneath it are catacombs holding the bones of around twenty five thousand people, buried between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries and later arranged, femur by femur, into patterns. It is not subtle and it is worth the queue.

Eat late. Lima does not take lunch seriously before one.

Peru's pre-Columbian history did not start with the Incas, and today is the correction to that. The Larco museum is in an eighteenth century mansion built on top of a seventh century pyramid, and its galleries run chronologically through three thousand years of ceramics, textiles and worked gold. The storage room, where tens of thousands of pots sit on open shelves rather than in vitrines, is more impressive than the display cases. So is the erotic ceramics annexe, which is exactly what it sounds like and entirely serious.

Then a pyramid in the middle of the smartest district in the city. Huaca Pucllana is a stepped adobe mound twenty two metres high, built between 200 and 700 AD out of millions of small hand made bricks stood on end, and it is now surrounded by apartment blocks on all four sides. It can only be seen on a guided walk, which takes about an hour.

Finish south in Barranco as the light goes. The Bridge of Sighs is a short wooden span over a ravine running down to the sea, the streets either side are the prettiest in Lima, and the bars behind it are where the city actually goes out.

The flight to Cusco is ninety minutes and it takes you from the sea to 3,400 metres in one go, which is an absurd thing to do to a body. Take a morning departure, because the wind in the bowl grounds afternoon flights more often than the airlines admit.

Then stop. The single best use of the first afternoon is the hotel courtyard, a pot of coca tea and a book, and everyone who ignores that advice loses the following day to a headache instead. If you feel fine, walk the Plaza de Armas slowly, at the pace of somebody much older than you.

One thing worth seeing on the way back is a wall. Hatun Rumiyoc street is lined with Inca masonry, and one block in it has twelve sides and twelve angles, cut so precisely that the stones either side of it fit without mortar and have not moved in five and a half centuries, through several earthquakes that flattened what the Spanish built above.

Qoricancha was the most important building in the Inca empire, its walls reportedly sheeted in gold, and the Spanish pulled the gold off and built the Santo Domingo church directly on top of the surviving stonework. What is left is the clearest illustration anywhere of what happened to this country in the sixteenth century: two architectures stacked on each other, the lower one better made. Seen from Avenida del Sol the join is obvious.

The cathedral on the main square is heavy with colonial painting from the Cusco school, in which Andean painters worked to European models and quietly changed the details. Entry is ticketed during the day and free if you attend the early morning mass, which is the local answer and requires actually attending it.

In the afternoon, the San Pedro market, ten minutes downhill. It has an aisle for fruit, an aisle for cheese, an aisle for chocolate and an aisle for offal, and it is the one place in central Cusco where the crowd is buying rather than browsing. The juice counters at the front will make anything you point at.

The ruins above Cusco are usually sold as a half day minibus circuit that stops at four sites in a fixed order. It is far better done backwards and on foot. Take a shared combi from the centre up to Tambomachay, the highest and furthest, and walk back down. The road drops steadily, the sites come at reasonable intervals, and you finish above the city with the whole bowl of it in front of you.

Tambomachay is small and strange: a set of terraced walls and channels around a spring that still runs, and whose source nobody has established, because finding it would mean digging up the site. Qenko, further down, is a limestone outcrop carved with zigzag channels, a cave cut into its base and a stone table inside it that was almost certainly used for sacrifice.

Sacsayhuaman is the one everybody photographs, and the scale takes a moment to register. Three tiers of zigzag walls made of blocks the size of small cars, fitted without mortar, and what survives is only a fraction of what stood here: the Spanish spent decades carting the smaller stones down the hill to build the city, and left the ones too big to move. That is why the remaining blocks are the enormous ones.

Walk down into the centre from there. Allow half an hour, and expect the last stretch to be a staircase.

Ollantaytambo is an hour and a half down the Sacred Valley and it is the best surviving Inca town anywhere: the grid of streets, the water channels running along them and many of the house walls are original, and people still live in them.

The terraces above the village were a temple that doubled as a fortress, and they are one of the very few places where an Inca army beat the Spanish in open battle. In 1537 Manco Inca held this slope, flooded the plain below to bog down the cavalry, and drove Hernando Pizarro's men back to Cusco. Climb to the top, where six huge pink blocks of the unfinished sun temple stand in a row, hauled from a quarry on the far side of the valley.

Across the town, on the other hillside, is the better walk and the free one. A steep path leads up to the storehouses at Pinkullyuna, built high and shaded to keep grain dry in the wind, and the view back at the terraces is the photograph people come for. It takes an hour up and rather less down.

Trains to Machu Picchu leave from the station at the bottom of the town, which is why the place is busy at nine in the morning and empty at four in the afternoon. Time your day accordingly.

The hop over the border takes about an hour and lands at El Alto, which at just over 4,000 metres is one of the highest international airports in the world. The drive down into the city drops several hundred metres in fifteen minutes and the view as the canyon opens up is the best introduction the place could have.

Plaza Murillo is the political centre of Bolivia, with the cathedral on one side and the presidential palaces on another: the old one, burnt in a nineteenth century uprising and known ever since as the Burnt Palace, and the tower block beside it that replaced it in 2018. The square is full of pigeons and of people with opinions, and a protest of some size is more likely than not.

Uphill from there, the streets narrow and steepen into the market district. The stalls of the Mercado de las Brujas sell dried llama foetuses, herbs, amulets and soapstone figures, all of it for Aymara household ritual rather than for tourists, and buried under a new building's foundations more often than displayed on a shelf. The same street sells charangos, the small ten string lute of the Andes, and the good ones are not cheap.

Take the evening slowly. You have gone up again, not down.

La Paz built a cable car network because it had no room for anything else, and the result is the best public transport ride on this continent. The red line was the first, opened in 2014, and it climbs out of the canyon to El Alto in ten minutes for the price of a coffee. Go early, when the light is on the mountains and the cabins are full of people going to work rather than to look.

At the top is El Alto, a city of about a million people that was a suburb forty years ago and is now larger than the capital it sits above. On Thursdays and Sundays the 16 de Julio market spreads across dozens of blocks below the station and sells everything that exists: car parts, wedding dresses, live guinea pigs, secondhand tools, entire kitchens. On other days it is an ordinary and very large street market.

Come back down and walk the general cemetery, which sounds grim and is not. The dead are stacked in walls, each niche fronted with glass and filled by the family with photographs, plastic flowers, miniature bottles and toys, and the aisles are painted, muralled and busy with people cleaning and visiting. It is the most direct look at Andean attitudes to death you will get without being invited to a funeral.

The afternoon is free, and after a morning at 4,000 metres you will use it.

Ten kilometres south of the centre, where the canyon widens and the rich suburbs start, the ground gives out into a field of clay spires. Valle de la Luna is not a valley and is not on the moon, but the erosion has left a maze of cones and gullies with a walkway threaded through them, and it takes about an hour to do the full circuit. Go in the morning, before the light goes flat.

Back in the centre, the San Francisco monastery is the best hour indoors in La Paz. The complex has been rebuilt across four centuries, the museum runs through the choir and the roof, and the tower gives a view over the market quarter that puts the whole vertical city in one frame. It was also, in 1809, one of the buildings at the centre of the La Paz rising, one of the first open revolts against Spanish rule in the Andes.

The Coca Museum is small, cramped and better argued than most national institutions. It sets out the plant's role in Andean life over several thousand years, its industrial history, and what the war on drugs did to a crop that most Bolivians chew, brew or offer without any of that context. Allow an hour, and read the English folders they hand you at the door.

For the last dinner in Bolivia, the country's best known restaurant is down in Calacoto and cooks nothing that was not grown, caught or reared inside the country. Book it before you leave home.

The flight south is under an hour and the descent is the introduction: brown altiplano, then a white line on the horizon that resolves into the edge of the salt flat as you turn to land. Uyuni's airport is small and the town is fifteen minutes away.

There is one thing to do in the town itself and it is genuinely good. Three kilometres out along the tracks, a few dozen steam locomotives and rolling stock sit rusting in the open where they were abandoned when the mining traffic dried up. Nothing is fenced, everything is climbable, the wind blows through the boilers and the metal is the same colour as the ground. Late afternoon is the light for it.

On the way back, stop at Colchani, the salt processing village on the edge of the flat, where salt is shovelled into cones to drain, dried in ovens and bagged by hand. It is also the last chance to buy gloves and a hat, both of which you will want tomorrow.

Arrange the salar tour tonight. Prices are similar everywhere and the difference between operators is the vehicle and the driver, so look at the jeep before you pay.

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, roughly ten thousand square kilometres of it, sitting at 3,656 metres and left behind by a lake that dried out thousands of years ago. The crust is a metre or more thick in places, arranged in hexagonal plates, with brine underneath and a great deal of the world's lithium under that.

Tours run to a standard shape and it works. Out past the salt piles drying at the edge, then an hour of driving on white with no features at all, which is when people start taking the perspective photographs the flat is famous for, and which are much harder to get right than they look. Bring a small object and some patience.

Lunch is at Incahuasi, a rock island in the middle covered in cactus that grows about a centimetre a year, which makes the tallest of them around a thousand years old. There is a path to the top and the view from it is the whole point of the day: white in every direction to a horizon that curves.

The afternoon runs to sunset somewhere on the flat, with a bottle of something and everybody's shadow forty metres long. If there is water on the surface, this is when the mirror happens.

Dress for it. It is bright enough to burn the underside of your chin, and cold the moment the sun drops.

Today is the drive, and it is a long one. The route runs south west across the altiplano to the mining crossing at Ollagüe, over the border, and down through the Chilean desert to San Pedro. Most of the day is spent in a vehicle at over 3,500 metres with volcanoes on both sides and nothing else at all, and the road surface alternates between good asphalt and something considerably less.

Two things make it easier. Eat before you leave, because there is nothing to buy for hours, and keep your passport, tourist card and any fruit or coca leaves accessible for the Chilean checkpoint, which is thorough. Coca is legal in Bolivia and not in Chile, and that catches people out at the end of two weeks of chewing it.

San Pedro appears as a line of poplars and adobe walls in a landscape with no other soft edges. It is 2,400 metres, which after a fortnight up high feels like being handed an extra lung.

If there is light left, hire a bicycle and ride the three kilometres out to the pukara at Quitor, the twelfth century hill fort the Atacameños held and Pedro de Valdivia's men took in 1540. The climb up the terraces takes twenty minutes and the oasis from up there is a strip of green in a valley of nothing.

El Tatio is the third largest geyser field on earth, with more than eighty active vents, and it sits at over 4,300 metres an hour and a half north of town. Every agency leaves around four in the morning for one reason: the columns of steam are at their tallest in the cold before sunrise, and they shrink as the ground warms. It is genuinely freezing, often well below zero, and the tour includes breakfast cooked on the tailgate and a thermal pool you can get into if you can face getting out.

Make sure the operator promises to be there before sunrise rather than after it. Some leave the field at first light to reach the pools early, which gets the order exactly backwards.

You will be back in town by lunchtime and useless for a few hours, which is what the afternoon is for.

Then Valle de la Luna, ten minutes west, for the last hour of the day. It is a salt and clay range eroded into ridges, craters and a set of spires called the Three Marys, and the rock crackles audibly as it cools. Sunset there is the most attended event in San Pedro; the crowd gathers at the Coyote viewpoint, and a bicycle gets you to a quieter part of the same ridge.

The best full day out of San Pedro climbs from the salt pan to a pair of lakes at 4,200 metres and takes most of the daylight. It starts at Toconao, an adobe village built from volcanic stone with a bell tower standing separately from its church, then crosses the Salar de Atacama to Laguna Chaxa, where three species of flamingo feed in brine so shallow it barely covers their feet. Andean, Chilean and James's flamingos are all resident, and telling them apart by leg colour is the morning's game.

The road then climbs to Miscanti and Miñiques, two dark blue lakes below volcanoes with a stiff wind coming off them, and on the full day version to Piedras Rojas, where iron in the rock has turned an entire shoreline rust red against white salt and turquoise water.

Lunch is at Socaire, a hamlet of a few hundred people that feeds every passing tour on potatoes, beans and quinoa grown on terraces below the village.

Take the full day rather than the half. The half day version turns around before the red rocks, which are the best part of it.

One last hour in town before the airport. The archaeological museum in the middle of San Pedro holds the collection assembled by Gustavo Le Paige, the Belgian priest who dug across this desert through the 1950s and 60s, and it explains what all those hill forts and villages actually were. The Atacameño mummies that made the museum famous are no longer displayed, at the request of the communities they came from, which is itself worth knowing.

Then the road to Calama, ninety minutes across the driest ground on the planet, past the copper mine that pays for a good deal of Chile. Book the transfer through your hotel the night before and leave three hours before the flight.

It is a long way back down to sea level, and after two weeks up here the thick air at the coast is the strangest part of the whole trip.