Editorials
The Ultimate Luxury Machu Picchu Experience
Machu Picchu is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world, which makes it sound like the kind of place you queue for. It doesn’t have to be. With the right itinerary and the right properties, the Belmond hotels, the private train, and Sanctuary Lodge at the entrance to the site, it is one of the great luxury travel experiences on the planet.
Start in Lima
Most travelers treat Lima as a stopover. That is a mistake. The city has one of the best restaurant scenes in South America, anchored by Central, consistently ranked among the best restaurants in the world, and Maido, which does remarkable things with Nikkei cuisine.
A night or two in Miraflores before heading into the mountains allows you to arrive in Cusco in good shape. Belmond Miraflores Park is the finest address in the city.
Acclimatize in the Sacred Valley
Flying straight to Cusco and heading immediately to Machu Picchu is the most common mistake on a Peru trip. The Sacred Valley, sitting at around 2,800 meters, is the sensible middle ground, and it happens to be one of the most beautiful places in the country.
The Inca sites at Pisac and Ollantaytambo are each worth serious time. Belmond Rio Sagrado and Sol y Luna are the two standout properties, set against the Andean peaks with the kind of calm that makes two nights feel like considerably more.
The Hiram Bingham Train
From Ollantaytambo, the Belmond Hiram Bingham winds through the cloud forest to Aguas Calientes in around 90 minutes, with 1920s Pullman carriages, an observation car, and a bar carriage. It is one of the great short rail journeys in South America and books out well ahead of peak season.
The train itself is worth dwelling on. The carriages are dressed in mahogany and brass, the bar car serves pisco sours as the valley narrows and the vegetation thickens around you, and lunch is a proper sit-down affair with Peruvian dishes prepared on board. As the cloud forest closes in and the altitude drops, the sense of arrival builds in a way that no road transfer can replicate. Getting to Machu Picchu this way is not just logistics. It is the first part of the experience.
No two trips we plan are the same. Yours will be no exception.
Request a quote →Machu Picchu Itself
Built by the Inca emperor Pachacuti in the 15th century and abandoned less than a hundred years later, Machu Picchu sat unknown to the outside world until Hiram Bingham reached it in 1911. What he found was a city of 200 structures, agricultural terraces, temples, and water channels cut from granite at 2,430 meters above sea level, so precisely engineered that the stonework has survived six centuries of Andean weather without mortar. Nobody knows with certainty what it was built for. That ambiguity is part of what makes it so compelling.
The site opens at 6am. Arriving in the first entry window, before the day crowds make the bus journey up from Aguas Calientes, is a fundamentally different experience. The morning mist sits in the valley below the terraces, the peaks above are clear, and the silence allows the scale of the place to register in a way that simply isn’t possible later in the day. A private guided visit with an archaeologist is worth considering.
Belmond Sanctuary Lodge
The only hotel at the entrance to Machu Picchu itself, Sanctuary Lodge occupies a position that cannot be replicated. Staying here means you can visit the site after the day visitors have left and again at first light before they arrive, which changes the experience entirely.
The hotel is not large, which is part of the point, and books out months in advance. It is one of the handful of properties in South America where the location justifies the planning effort required to secure it.
Gay Travel in Peru
Peru does not yet recognize same-sex marriage, and LGBTQ+ legal protections remain limited compared to much of South America. That said, Lima’s Miraflores district has a well-established gay scene, and the luxury travel environment across the country, the Belmond properties, the Sacred Valley lodges, the top hotels in Cusco, is entirely open and welcoming.
LGBTQ+ travelers move through Peru’s luxury circuit without issue, and Out Of Office has been building itineraries here for years with that in mind. The country rewards those who plan it well, and we make sure you arrive informed and well-placed at every stage of the trip.
What Out Of Office Handles
Sanctuary Lodge books out months in advance. So does the Hiram Bingham. Machu Picchu entry slots at first light go quickly. Getting all three right, in the right sequence, around the right properties in Lima and the Sacred Valley, is the kind of planning that rewards working with people who know Peru well.
We handle every element, and for those who want to extend the journey into the Amazon, the lodges in Tambopata add a completely different register to the trip and connect naturally to the end of the Inca circuit.
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