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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Planning
for Peru I am sure that many other Mensans with children in their 20s will be equally envious of their offspring's round the world trips. The stories and photos of some of the exotic places they visit certainly encouraged the travel bug in my wife Ann and me. When our daughter and the son of a close friend toured South America in 2003, the "older generation" became particularly interested. Of the various countries they visited, we asked which was the most memorable that they would recommend? Both said Peru, with Machu Picchu being the highlight. Whereas my daughter and her friend backpacked their three-month trip, crowded on a rather basic tour bus, we obviously wanted a slightly more comfortable and shorter holiday. So, with some other friends interested: how to go about planning it? Well, obviously the Sunday colour supplements are full of holiday companies offering wonderful trips with wonderfully expensive prices. None, however, had everything we wanted. To get started, then, a few of us visited the annual "Destinations: The Holiday & Travel Show" in February in Earls Court. I believe it is also on at the Birmingham NEC a month later. This is a showcase for independent travel companies and very worthwhile to attend. It offers the chance to meet, discuss and assess the specialist tour operators and also get some great ideas for creating the perfect holiday. If you get the right daily paper (this year, it was sponsored by the Times), you can even get free tickets for the show. So we had a shortlist of specialist companies and an itinerary soon developed taking into account everyone's "Must See" sights. Going in a group of 10 means that the number of sights to visit does increase. For instance, I was not initially bothered going to Lake Titicaca. One big lake is surely similar to any other big stretch of water in the world? Thankfully, I was overruled and I was glad in the end that we visited the lake with its unique floating Uros islands. This leads to one obvious but important point: if you organise a holiday with several people, then there will be more things that people want to see and do, thus making the trip longer. What was initially going to be a two-week holiday ended up closer to three weeks. Apparently our itinerary was locally known as the "Gringo Trail". With affection, I hope! The process of whittling down the shortlist of companies from the Destinations show to get to the frontrunner was lengthy. It was also a chore trying to get the cost down to a reasonable budget. However, this was where we hit problems. There was a change of adviser at the travel company we had selected. The new adviser (in fact, the owner of the business) must have decided that we were getting too good a deal and started making costly changes. So what next - pay the extra, after we thought we had almost agreed the price (not a popular choice!) or look again at the other shortlisted companies? In time-honoured fashion, there was a "third way". I contacted the Peruvian embassy in London and got a lot of useful information including a list of established travel companies based in Peru. We sent out our proposed itinerary to a number of different companies via the internet and received a variety of interesting responses. This is where I found Skype very handy in talking for free to these companies. I was amazed at how many travel companies are on Skype. There was no problem in their speaking English; useful, as my Spanish is non-existent. We eventually chose a large Peruvian company, Coltur, who gave us a fabulous holiday at a very keen price, paying in US Dollars. We went in May 2007 when paying in US Dollars was certainly to our benefit. We contracted the local tour company for the overland part of the holiday, buying our return International flight tickets through Opodo with Iberia. Buying the holiday separately from the flights was the easy and logical choice to save money. I wouldn't particularly recommend Iberia, but they seem to have a virtual monopoly in the European to South America routes. A strange relic of the old Spanish colonial ties! One issue we had was - how did we know that we could trust this travel company on the other side of the world with our money? Obviously they needed checking out. They said that they dealt with the Peruvian arrangements for various UK travel companies such as Thomas Cook and Saga Holidays. Not taking their word for it, I did phone both Thomas Cook and Saga and they gave very good references for our chosen Peruvian company. We also paid by credit card to get the protection that card companies offer, even though it upped the price of the holiday a bit. I was surprised when one of my friends found out that their credit card company would not pay out on a foreign "Merchant" defaulting on our holiday. However, after checking my Morgan Stanley MasterCard, they confirmed that we were indeed covered. So it is prudent to check - don't take it for granted that you are necessarily protected in the same way that you are for buying ordinary goods in the UK. It is worth printing out and taking on holiday all the relevant email exchanges concerned with the holiday. There were a couple of instances where a local tour guide tried to charge us extra for things that were included. Having the relevant email to hand did prove very handy. For instance, the particular company who managed our Inca Trail trip wanted to initially charge us extra for sleeping bags. One of my emails confirmed that the price included their hire and so we were spared any potential hassle. We dealt with many different guides on our trip as we had a different one for each region we visited. This was not a limitation of the tour company, but the national legislation, which states that guides can only operate in their own region. We were very pleased with this arrangement as it meant that we always had specialists who knew all the local restaurants, shops, facilities etc. Would I recommend the tailor-made rather than package approach to such holidays? Not always, but in this case, yes. The downside is that you have to do a lot of time-consuming work yourself, checking out the hotels, lengths of coach journeys, etc. Peru is a surprisingly large country and initially we thought we could fly between certain destinations. However, we soon found out that all internal flights operate with Lima as the central hub. This would therefore have required additional overnight stays back in the capital if you wanted to fly between different parts of the country - not very practical. It needed people with local knowledge to point out things like that to us. After all the planning and organising, what about the holiday itself? If you are thinking about it - stop thinking and go to Peru - you will have a fabulous experience. We all had one of the most memorable and fascinating holidays of our lives. But that's another story... First published in VISA 78 (Jun08) |