Quelccaya Day Tour from Cusco

Your driver arrives at your hotel at three in the morning. It is an unkind hour and there is no way around it. The plateau clouds over by early afternoon, so the whole day is built backwards from one requirement. You need to be standing at the ice while the sky is still open.

Sleep in the vehicle. Most people do. The first two hours run on tarmac and the road is smooth enough to make that easy.

Bring your passport, cash in soles and every warm layer you own. The van is heated. The viewpoint is not.

Cusipata is a farming village in the Vilcanota valley, roughly ninety minutes south of Cusco. We stop here while it is still dark and the kitchen is already open for us.

Breakfast matters more than it sounds. This is your last proper meal for around seven hours, and eating well while you are still at a comfortable altitude is one of the few things that genuinely helps with what comes later.

Take the coca or muña tea if it is offered. Use the bathroom before you leave. There is nothing beyond this point until the afternoon.

The road turns east out of the valley and starts to climb. Within half an hour the tarmac ends and the surface becomes graded gravel.

This is the long stretch, close to three hours, and it is where the country changes completely. Farmland gives way to bofedales, the high wetlands where alpaca graze year round. Stone corrals appear. Houses grow rarer, then stop altogether.

Dawn arrives somewhere in here. On a clear morning the Vilcanota peaks come up on your left one after another, still holding snow across their upper faces.

Watch for vicuña. They are wild, they are protected and they are common on this plateau. Your driver will slow down if a herd is grazing near the track.

The vehicle stops at the Puerto Caliz sector. There is a small control point here, and the community entrance fee of 15 soles is paid in cash.

Step out slowly. You have gained roughly 1,500 metres since breakfast without moving a muscle, and the first thirty seconds outside the van tell most people exactly where they stand with the altitude.

Your guide checks the group here before anyone walks anywhere. If your oxygen saturation is low, that is useful information and not a reason for embarrassment.

The walk to the viewpoint takes ten to twenty minutes over loose, uneven ground. It is not far at all. At 5,100 metres it will still feel like work, and there is no reason whatsoever to hurry.

Then the ice. It does not look like the glaciers in photographs, the ones hanging in a valley between two ridges. Quelccaya is a cap. It lies flat across the top of the plateau and runs out of sight in both directions, and the scale takes a moment to resolve properly.

Below it sit the meltwater lagoons. One runs turquoise and the other a heavy grey brown, and both are fed by the same ice. The difference is rock flour, the fine sediment a glacier grinds off the bedrock as it moves.

You have around ninety minutes here. Use them. Take more photographs than you think you need, because weather on this plateau closes in with very little warning and a day tour gives you no second attempt.

Nobody walks on the ice, including our crew. Quelccaya is an active research site and its margins are unstable.

We stop at Sibinacocha on the way out. It is a lake of around thirty square kilometres, held between the plateau and the range, and it is among the largest high altitude lakes in Peru.

Almost nobody in Cusco has heard of it. It appears on very few day tour itineraries because it adds an hour to an already long day. We think that hour is the best value in the whole trip.

The water changes colour through the morning with the wind and the light. Flamingos work the shallows at the southern end. Behind them the Vilcanota holds the entire horizon.

Back down the same track. Most people sleep, and you should let them.

The descent is where the altitude lifts. Somewhere around 4,000 metres headaches ease off, appetite comes back and the day starts to feel like an achievement rather than an ordeal.

We will drop you near Plaza Regocijo, one block from the Plaza de Armas, somewhere between half past five and six in the evening.

Eat early and sleep. You have been awake for fifteen hours and you spent six of them above 4,700 metres.