The phrase ‘lost city’ has an enthralling resonance about it. The mystery of abandonment and the thrill of rediscovery. Perhaps no city has been more lost or more wonderfully rediscovered than Machu Picchu, its stone terraces hovering, silent and untrodden for centuries amidst the Andean clouds, high above Peru’s Urabamba Valley, breathtaking in its solitary magnificence and breathtaking, literally too, in its oxygen depleted air. Machu Picchu was not our sole destination, though. We had embarked on a trip that would introduce us to the many other glories of Peru.

In the absence of direct flights, we flew from London to Amsterdam, and from there onto Lima, perched on the Pacific coast at the confluence of the Chillon, Rimac and Lurin rivers (everywhere is high in Peru). The following morning we toured the colonial grandeur that frames the centre of the Lima. Towering over us was the San Francisco Monastery, flamboyant in its Spanish neoclassicism. Beneath us, and the monastery, were the catacombs, a winding cavern of an ossuary, the bones of some 25,000 Limenos apparently interred here. In Peru, we were to discover, the past, however seemingly buried, has a habit of breaking through the surface of things.

On the third morning, we left Lima, and our plane took us across the Andes to Arequipa, overlooked even at 7,800 above sea level by the snow-capped volcano, El Misti. Arequipa feels at one with the snow; many of its colonial buildings, arranged in colonnaded plazas, are made from sillar, a white volcanic rock that entranced pre-Inca settlers every bit as much as it seduced later Spanish architects with its pearly luminescence. On our visit to the Juanita museum, we came face to haunting face with Peru’s pre-Colombian past. Juanita, or the Ice Maiden, is the mummified and startlingly preserved body of an Inca girl – she was aged about 14 when she perished sometime between 1440 and 1450 – found on the cordillera of nearby Mount Ampato.

From Arequipa, we drove into the Andes, the peaks seemingly touching the sky, the slopes ribbed alike by the flow of ancient rivers and the agricultural terraces carved by the Incas, passingalong the way herds of llama, towards the Colca Canyon. A word of advice here. The Colca Valley rests at 14,000 feet above sea level, and, in the thin air, oxygen can be in short supply. I brought a cache of diamox tablets with me, prescribed by my doctor before we travelled, and I was thankful for the relief they offered.

The Canyon – twice as deep as the Grand Canyon – is dotted with a series of delightful villages, each with its own little market. Early on the morning after our arrival – we were comfortably ensconced at the Casa Andina hotel – we took a trip to Condor Cross from where we marvelled at these gigantic birds as, almost motionless save for the flickering of the tips of their wings in the breeze, they rode the thermal currents that rose up from the valley far, far below.

Refreshed by the hot springs that also rise and bubble in the Colca, we readied ourselves for the next stage of our journey: Lake Titicaca. Sat on the border with Bolivia and fed by the meltwater from the glaciers that have gouged their way through the Altiplano sierras, Lake Titicaca was regarded by the Incas as the place from which the world was created, the work of the god, Viracocha who emerged from its waters to bring the stars and the earth and its people into existence. I could imagine how this vast bowl of water, suspended up here in the heavens, captured the minds of the Incas as a mythic source of life. Speckled across the Lake are what appear to be small islands but are in fact Uros, platforms of totora reeds, crafted and strapped and bound by the local people to serve as floating homes. The Uros are re-built afresh from a new crop of reeds every nine months.

While at Titicaca, we dropped in at a local school. The children sang angelically for us; in return, the money that visitors contribute after a performance is used to pay the salary of their teacher. The hills surrounding the Lake are terraced and planted with wheat and potatoes, with long stone fences separating crops from the grazing alpacas.

Bidding farewell to Titicaca, we next boarded the Andean Explorer, a train in the grand old style of the Orient Express, which clattered along at a leisurely pace, allowing to gaze in wonderment at the mountains, the steams and rivers, the valleys and the villages. The rail journey to our next destination – Cuzco – was a bare 250 miles, yet in that space I witnessed landscapes that varied in nature and appearance from Italian Tyrol to Provencal countryside to barren desert.

Cuzco’s beauty is its architectural testimony to Peru’s history of competing civilisations. Spanish colonial baroque, ornate, elaborate, conquering, sits atop massive stone walls built by the Incas. Cuzco was once the capital of the Incas’ own empire, and its streets andalleyways were said to have been laid out in the effigy form of a puma, a creature sacred in the pantheon of Inca belief. On his arrival in 1533, conquistador Francisco Pizarro sacked much of the old Inca city, with only the boundary walls and the Temples of the Sun and Virgins of the Sun surviving the Spanish re-arrangement of their new property.

Close by lie the remains of another walled complex, Sacsayhuaman. It was constructed, during the 12th century AD, not by the Incas but by another pre-Colombian culture, the Killke (the Inca appropriated the buildings when they assumed control of the area). The huge stones of Sacsayhuaman are so perfectly adjoined, so precisely interlocking that it is impossible, even after a millennium of weathering and conquest (the Spanish harvested the limestone blocks in order to build Cuzco’s crop of churches), to slip a single sheet of paper between some of them.

On the day after our arrival in Cuzco, we travelled some 60 miles to the western end of the Incas’ Sacred Valley and to the fortress of Ollantaytambo. It was in this stronghold that the Incas, under Manco Yupanqui, most fiercely resisted Pizarro’s advance through their territory. Here Inca architecture has also put up resistance. Even now you can see Inca doorways, narrow, tall and topped with a single stone lintel. There are Inca fountains, too, splashing water as they once did for the princesses that bathed by them. Inca terraces ramp their way up the hillsides, the plan of Ollantaytambo always contesting the constraints of the vertical. Nowhere is this defiance of gravity more spectacular than in the Inca storehouses, pressed into the mountainous slopes, where the grain from the terraces was kept, winnowed and ventilated by the winds which sweep up the valley.

An overnight stay at the Casa Andina hotel ushered us, the next morning, to Machu Picchu. A train, accustomed to hauling itself up the slopes, carried us on the final stage to the lost city. Machu Picchu, its temples, houses, aqueducts and alleys blending with the paradise green of the hills, was built by the Incas around 1450 and deserted by them about a hundred years later. It was only in 1911 that archaeologists from outside Peru discovered its marvels. Machu Picchu feels a symbol both of Inca might and vulnerability: enthroned at the top of the world – saddled between two mountain peaks, the cliffs falling 450 metres sheer in places to the river, invisible in the mists, at their foot – yet also a magnificent refuge from the encroaching threat of the Spanish invaders. So seemingly intact the walls, so upright the polished stones, so preserved the steps, so exact the temples, that it was impossible to shake off the sensation that the abandonment had happened just years ago. Our guide was splendid, and the three hours we spent at the site seemed to fleet by.

We spent the night Machu Picchu – the following morning was ours to explore further – and then we were on our way back by train and road to Cuzco. There we enjoyed one last night at another fabulous hotel before it was time to catch our flight to Lima, and back to Amsterdam and London. The trip lasted 14 days. 14 days that spanned worlds and civilisations and centuries. 14 days I will remember forever.

The team at Tickets Anywhere can tailor and plan a Peruvian or South American holiday of a lifetime – or the holiday of a lifetime anywhere else – specifically to suit your wishes, making sure that it includes the sights you want see and the places you want to visit.