Reflections on Peru and Bolivia

I’m back from all my travels! Unfortunately all Caplan guys got fairly sick in South America (respiratory not digestive), but we’re finally almost back to 100%. Special thanks to honorary Tío Fabio Rojas for teaching my three sons how to be cool guys. My main thoughts on the journey:

1. Lima is an economic powerhouse, but a mediocre tourist destination. We enjoyed the pre-Incan archaeological sites and the Museo Larco archaeological museum, including its rather tame erotica gallery. But we never found Peruvian food as good as northern Virginia’s Wild Chicken or Superchicken. We encountered the most frightful traffic jam of my life at midnight near the airport, even though no one was injured and the delay was only 40 minutes. Lima’s highlight was ringing in 2026 on our apartment rooftop. The city looked like it was under attack by a flamboyant superpower. Best fireworks show of my life!

2. The logistics of visiting Machu Picchu are agonizing. The tickets are grossly underpriced, hence severely rationed. The website by default only lets you book 2026 tickets starting in 2026. (Exception: You can book January 2026 tickets starting in mid-November, not December 1 as I somehow came to believe). The magic bus and train ticket from Cusco to Pueblo Machu Picchu is not underpriced, but the website bizarrely changes the ticket date to tomorrow when you change the number of passengers from the default of 1, so I accidentally wasted $400 on mis-scheduled train tickets for weeks before our trip. The final bus from Pueblo Machu Picchu to the site also has long lines, but mostly because they insist on matching the names on the $6 tickets to passports. For thousands of passengers every day!

3. Peru in general, and Machu Picchu in particular, had the most fascist “papers please” system I’ve ever encountered. Worse than India! The initial logic, presumably: Due to absurd fairness norms, the Peruvian government grossly underprices Machu Picchu tickets. This in turn leads to resale paranoia, hence multiple checks to make sure that the name on your Machu Picchu ticket matches the name on your passport. But this resale paranoia puts Peru on a slippery slope where they repeatedly check every ticket against your passport, even though most of the tickets are not underpriced and hence little danger of resale. So in order to preserve this atavistic fairness regime, the Peruvian government dumps a dozen bitter buckets

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