Most people who visit Peru do a version of the same trip. They fly into Lima, spend a night, head to Cusco, walk around Machu Picchu, and fly home. It is a good trip. But Peru is a much bigger, stranger, and more varied country than that version of it suggests, and the travelers who figure that out tend to be the ones who stay longer and go deeper. The Wonderland of Peru 19 Days / 18 Nights itinerary exists for exactly those people. It is a route designed to show you what Peru actually is, not just the highlights that fit on a postcard.
Nineteen days sounds like a lot. For Peru, it is barely enough. But if you plan it right, those 19 days take you from the Pacific coast through desert dunes and wildlife islands, into the high Andes, across ancient ruins, and all the way to the edge of the Amazon. The country shifts beneath your feet constantly, and that is exactly what makes a trip this long feel like it never runs out of new things to show you.
Starting Strong: Lima, Paracas, Islas Ballestas, Reserva de Paracas, Ica, and Huacachina Sandboarding
The first stretch of the Wonderland of Peru itinerary heads south from Lima along the Pacific coast, and it sets the tone immediately by proving that Peru is not just a mountain country. The coastal region is dramatic, dry, and full of wildlife and history that most visitors never get around to seeing.
Lima itself deserves at least a day or two. The food scene in Lima is genuinely world-class, and the Miraflores neighborhood, sitting on clifftops above the Pacific, is a great place to get your bearings and start adjusting to Peru time before the bigger adventures begin. The central historic district around the Plaza Mayor is packed with colonial architecture and history that gives you some context for everything you are about to see further south and inland.
Paracas is a few hours south of Lima by road, and the change in landscape between the two is immediate and dramatic. The city gives way to a bare, windswept coastline where the desert meets the ocean in a collision of brown rock and deep blue water. The Reserva de Paracas is a national reserve that protects this coastline and the extraordinary wildlife that calls it home. Flamingos feed in the shallows, sea lions lounge on rocks, and the landscape has a raw, elemental quality that feels very far from anything urban.
From Paracas, a boat trip out to the Islas Ballestas is one of those experiences that earns its nickname without much argument. The islands are sometimes called the poor man’s Galapagos, which is both a little unfair and completely understandable. They are covered in sea lions, Humboldt penguins, Peruvian boobies, pelicans, and cormorants in numbers that are genuinely hard to believe until you are floating next to a rock covered in hundreds of barking sea lions while pelicans swoop overhead. The boat tours are short, affordable, and run most mornings from the Paracas pier.
Further inland, the town of Ica sits in the middle of the desert and serves as the base for what many travelers rate as one of the most fun activities in all of Peru. Huacachina is a small oasis lagoon surrounded by enormous sand dunes, and the main event there is sandboarding. You ride a dune buggy up to the top of dunes that reach 200 meters high and then strap a board to your feet and slide down. There is nothing complicated about it, nothing that requires experience or skill, and the combination of speed, sand, and the sheer absurdity of skiing down a desert dune makes it something that almost everyone who tries it loves immediately.
Watching the sun go down over Huacachina from the top of a dune is the kind of moment that stops a conversation. The light turns the sand orange and deep red, the lagoon below catches the reflection of the sky, and the whole desert goes quiet for a few minutes in a way that feels almost deliberate. It is a genuinely beautiful end to the coastal section of the trip before you head deeper into the country.
What Comes Next: The Andes, Cusco, and Beyond
After the coast and the desert, the Wonderland of Peru itinerary turns inland and upward into the Andes. Cusco is the heart of this section, and the city alone rewards multiple days of exploration. The streets are a blend of Incan stone foundations and Spanish colonial buildings built on top of them, and wandering through the San Blas neighborhood or the market at San Pedro gives you a street-level sense of how alive and layered Cusco really is.
The Sacred Valley, Rainbow Mountain, and the various trekking options around Machu Picchu fill the middle stretch of the 19 days with hiking, ruins, mountain views, and the kind of physical experience that makes everything feel more real and more earned. By the time you reach Machu Picchu itself, you have been moving through the landscape that surrounds it for long enough that the citadel feels like a natural conclusion to a journey rather than a quick stop on a checklist.
Conclusion: Nineteen Days, One Country, More Than Enough to Change How You Travel
The Wonderland of Peru 19 Days / 18 Nights itinerary works because it respects the fact that Peru is genuinely enormous in what it offers and refuses to pretend that a week is enough to understand it. The route from Lima down the coast to Paracas, out to the Islas Ballestas, through the Reserva de Paracas, and into the desert at Ica and Huacachina for sandboarding is just the beginning, and it is already more varied and surprising than most full trips to other countries.
Peru has a way of making you feel like you have barely scratched the surface no matter how long you stay, and that is not a frustrating thing. It is an invitation. The country keeps going, keeps shifting, and keeps revealing new corners that look nothing like the last one. Nineteen days gives you enough time to feel that properly, and if you do this trip right, you will come home already thinking about when you can go back.
Take the 19 days. See the desert and the dunes and the penguins and the ruins and the mountains. Peru will do the rest.
