Two weeks in the Andes: Lima to the Uyuni salt flats

Most rail trips are planned around the trains. This one has to be planned around their absence.

South America once had a continental network and now has fragments. What survives on this route survives because nothing else goes there, and knowing which two legs those are is the difference between a smooth fortnight and a very long day at a bus terminal.

The route, leg by leg

Fourteen nights across five bases and two countries. One leg is a flight, two are trains, and the rest are buses. Times are indicative and worth rechecking at booking, because the Peruvian legs changed shape during 2026.

Run it in reverse if you are flying home from Santiago or crossing into Chile at the end. The connectivity advice does not change with direction. The altitude advice does: going south to north you arrive in Cusco already acclimatised, which is easier on you and on your battery.

Where your phone stops working like home

This is the part almost every Andes itinerary skips, and the part most likely to cost you money.

You may have read that roaming charges were abolished across the Andean Community. That is true. It is also, almost certainly, irrelevant to you.

Decision 854 took effect on 1 January 2022 and removed roaming surcharges between Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Peru's transport ministry set out the terms when it came into force: it covers postpaid plans, held by residents of those four countries, using the same line number.

So for a visitor there are three options and one of them is quietly enormous. Roaming on your home plan works everywhere on this route and can cost more than the flights. A local SIM is cheap per gigabyte and now hard to buy, and a regional eSIM covers both countries on one plan.

The middle option is the one that changed. Peru's regulator OSIPTEL requires biometric identity validation to activate a prepaid line, checked against the immigration database, and it has to be done in person at an operator's own service centre. Fingerprints in a shop in Cusco is a real way to spend an afternoon.

Bolivia is less strict and more scattered. Registration is lighter, but coverage on the altiplano is the constraint rather than paperwork, and the useful shops are in La Paz rather than Uyuni.

The practical answer is the boring one: one regional plan, installed before you leave, so the Desaguadero border is a change of scenery rather than a change of tariff.

Lima, two nights

Two nights, and they are for acclimatising to the trip rather than the altitude. Lima is at sea level, which is the last time that will be true for a fortnight.

Miraflores and Barranco are where most people stay and where the coastline is worth the walk. The centre is a bus or taxi away and worth half a day. Do not schedule anything demanding: you will fly to 3,400m on day three.

Lima to Cusco

Fly. This is the one leg where the alternative is not a close call: the bus takes over twenty hours and climbs from sea level to 3,400m while you sleep sitting up, which is the worst possible way to meet altitude.

The flight is about an hour and twenty-five minutes and there are many a day. Book a morning departure. Afternoon flights into Cusco are the ones that get turned back by weather, and being bumped to tomorrow costs you a night of a five-night base.

Cusco, five nights

Five nights sounds generous and is not. Two of them are gone to Machu Picchu, one goes to the Sacred Valley, and the first is the one where you sit still and drink coca tea because you have just arrived at 3,400m.

Cusco itself deserves the rest. It is an Inca capital with a Spanish city built on top of it, literally: the cathedral sits on Inca foundations you can put your hand on, and the stonework in the streets around Hatun Rumiyoc is the reason people come back.

The Machu Picchu leg, and why it is not quite a train

There is no road to Machu Picchu. You walk for four days or you take the train, which is why this is the one rail leg on the route that nobody skips.

What has changed is where the train starts. PeruRail now runs a bimodal service: a bus from Cusco to the railhead, then the train to Aguas Calientes. Since 1 September 2025 selected departures transfer at Pachar rather than Ollantaytambo.

The seasonal part matters more. For the 2026 dry-season timetable the direct train from Poroy runs roughly May to December, and outside that window the Cusco to Ollantaytambo leg is a mandatory bus. A January itinerary and a July one are different trips, and most blog posts describe only one of them.

Book the train well ahead in either case. Capacity to Aguas Calientes is finite, entry tickets to the site are timed and sold separately, and the two sell out independently of each other.

Cusco to Puno

The second rail leg, and the second one that is not purely rail. PeruRail's Titicaca service is currently listed on its own status page as a bus and train combination rather than a through train.

Taken as a day out it is still worth it. The route crosses La Raya at 4,338m, which is the highest you will go on this trip, and the scenery between Cusco and the lake is the reason to do it in daylight rather than take the overnight bus.

If the schedule does not fit, buses run the same corridor in about seven hours and cost a fraction. This is a leg to choose on your budget rather than your principles.

Puno, two nights

Puno is not a beautiful town and Lake Titicaca is worth the stop anyway. At 3,830m it is also the highest place you will sleep before La Paz, which makes it useful acclimatisation whether or not you planned it that way.

The floating Uros islands are the obvious excursion and are exactly as touristed as you expect. Taquile, further out, is the one people remember.

Puno to La Paz

A bus, and the leg where the routing matters. Most services cross at Desaguadero, which is direct and dull. The alternative goes via Copacabana and the Kasani crossing, adding a lakeside town and a ferry over the Strait of Tiquina.

Either way you are leaving the Andean Community's roaming area in the sense that matters to you, which is to say nothing changes, because it never applied to your SIM.

Budget an hour at the border on a full coach. Bolivian entry requirements vary by nationality more than most countries on this continent, and a few passports still need a visa arranged in advance, so check yours before you book anything.

La Paz, two nights

La Paz is the most physically startling city on the route. It is built into a canyon, the rich live at the bottom where the air is thicker, and the public transport is a cable car network that doubles as the best sightseeing in the city.

Two nights is enough for the Mi Teleférico lines, the Mercado de las Brujas and a look at the Valle de la Luna. Three if you want Tiwanaku, though at 3,640m most people find La Paz tiring rather than restful.

La Paz to Uyuni, the one real train

This is the leg the whole route is built around, and the only genuine long-distance passenger train on it.

You take a bus to Oruro, about three hours, and pick up the railway there. Two services run the Oruro to Uyuni stretch in around seven hours: the faster Expreso del Sur and the slower Wara Wara del Sur, each running a couple of times a week in each direction.

The difference between them is the point. The Expreso stops only at the main stations. The Wara Wara stops at all twelve, including altiplano villages that have no other public transport at all, and costs less to do it.

Neither runs every day, which is the constraint people discover too late. If the dates do not work there are overnight buses from La Paz to Uyuni, and they are a genuinely worse experience on a genuinely worse road.

Uyuni, three nights

Three nights, and only one of them is really about the town. Uyuni is a supply post that exists to send you somewhere else.

The salt flat is the somewhere else. Day tours run onto the Salar and back; the two and three-day versions carry on south through the coloured lagoons towards the Chilean border, which is also the standard way to leave for San Pedro de Atacama if you are continuing.

In the wet season, roughly December to April, a film of water turns the Salar into a mirror. In the dry season you get the hexagons and firmer ground for driving. They are different photographs and different trips.

Altitude, and what it does to your phone

This is the section no European rail guide needs and this one does.

You will spend eleven of fourteen nights above 3,300m, and cold thin air is hard on batteries. A phone that lasts a day at home will not last a day on a salt flat tour at 3,670m in a vehicle with no charging.

Carry a power bank and keep the phone in an inside pocket rather than an outside one. Cold drains it faster than the screen does.

Coverage follows the roads and the towns, and both are sparse up here. Cusco, Puno, La Paz and Uyuni town are all fine. The gaps are the long stretches between them, the Salar itself, and the lagoon route south towards Chile, where there is nothing for hours at a stretch.

How much data two weeks here needs

This route is map-heavy, translation-light and upload-heavy, because the landscape is the point and you will photograph all of it.

That puts most people between 500 MB and 1 GB a day, so 10 GB covers the fortnight. Take 20 GB if you are working from the road, and remember you will not be topping up in Uyuni.

Before you go

• Install the eSIM at home on wifi. Doing it in Lima airport is fine; doing it in Uyuni is not.
• Download offline maps for both countries, including the stretch between Oruro and Uyuni. That is where you will want them.
• Fix your Uyuni train dates first and build the rest of the trip around them. Two departures a week is the tightest constraint on the route.
• Book Machu Picchu train tickets and site entry separately, and early. They sell out independently.
• Check whether your Machu Picchu departure is a train or a bus-plus-train, which depends on the month you travel.
• Carry a power bank. Eleven nights above 3,300m is hard on a battery, and salt flat tours have no sockets.

Booking and official sources

• PeruRail sells both Peruvian rail legs and is the only place the bimodal arrangement is stated plainly.
• Bolivia's Expreso del Sur and Wara Wara del Sur timetable has the twice-weekly departures. Ferroviaria Andina's own site was unreachable when this was written, so treat the times as indicative and confirm at the station.
• OSIPTEL, Peru's telecoms regulator, is where the prepaid registration rules are published if you want the source rather than a shop's account of them.
• Peru's Ministry of Transport and Communications set out who the Andean roaming decision actually covers, which is the fact most travel writing gets wrong.
• Tren Ecuador's service board is worth a look if you were considering adding Ecuador by rail. Most of the network, including the Tren Crucero, is marked suspended.

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