Life.Culture.Discovery.

Travellers' Checks | Great train journeys of the world: Puno to Cusco, Peru, now by luxury sleeper

The high-altitude Belmond Andean Explorer has been lavishly upgraded
to take passengers from the shores of Lake Titicaca to the former Inca capital, and out west to the Pacific coast

3-MIN READ3-MIN

Aboard the Belmond Andean Explorer in Peru.

Published: 1:16pm, 20 May 2017Updated: 1:16pm, 20 May 2017

One of the world’s great train journeys – the high-altitude Andean Explorer, running through the Peruvian Andes between Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and Cusco, the former capital of the Inca empire – has been lavishly upgraded.

Still jointly run by PeruRail and the luxury hotel and train operator Belmond, the new train replaces the daily 10-hour, 390km service with a twice-weekly (once each way) overnight run (heralded as “South America’s first luxury sleeper train”), with renovated carriages, upmarket dining and significantly higher fares. The spare days are taken up with a new round-trip journey out west to Arequipa, which was previously made only by freight trains serving the Pacific coast.

Now called the Belmond Andean Explorer – and using rolling stock taken from Australia’s short-lived Great South Pacific Express, which ran from 1999-2003 – the service can be booked either through belmond.com or perurail.com, but the latter is more user friendly. It’s also the only one to offer a list of fares, which begin from US$480 per person each way.

Air France will get you from Hong Kong to Lima (almost exactly halfway round the world), for connecting domestic flights, with only one stopover in Paris. Failing that, the “Japan Train Viewing” YouTube channel recently uploaded an HD video of the entire 10-hour journey from Cusco to Puno, taken from the older train’s observation car.