We depart early in the morning from Otopeni, with a layover in Amsterdam, and cross the Atlantic during the day. We land in Lima in the evening, local time — eight hours behind Romania — and settle into Miraflores, the cliffside neighborhood.

In the morning, the historic center: Plaza de Armas, with the cathedral and the government palace, and the San Francisco monastery, with its old library and catacombs where the bones of twenty-five thousand people are arranged.

In the afternoon, Barranco, the bohemian district with colorful houses and the Bridge of Sighs, and the Miraflores cliff, from where paragliders take off over the Pacific. In the evening, the first Peruvian cooking lesson: ceviche, in the city that invented it.

An hour and twenty minutes flight over the Andes. In Cusco we are at 3,400 meters, so we don't stay: we descend directly into the Sacred Valley, at 2,800, where acclimatization is milder.

We stop at Pisac, at the ruins on the ridge — agricultural terraces that descend hundreds of meters — and at the village market, the most colorful in the region. We check into a 17th-century hacienda, on the river bank, and rest: it's the day the body gets used to the thin air.

Maras: three thousand stepped salt ponds on a hillside, fed by a salty spring and worked by the same pre-Inca families. Then Moray, the circular terraces dug into the earth like an amphitheater, where the Incas tested crops at different temperatures.

In the afternoon, Ollantaytambo, the only continuously inhabited Inca city, with its fortress climbing the hill in giant terraces. From here we take the train with panoramic windows, an hour and a half through the Urubamba River gorge, to Aguas Calientes, the village at the foot of the mountain.

We take the first buses, before seven, when the mist is still rising from the valley. Machu Picchu appears suddenly, whole: the terraces, the temples, the plaza and Huayna Picchu peak in the background. A three-hour guided tour of the city — the Temple of the Sun, Intihuatana, the stone that "ties the sun", the residential quarter.

We stay until noon, then descend to the train and return to Cusco, where we arrive in the evening. We check into a colonial house a few minutes from Plaza de Armas.

Qorikancha, the Temple of the Sun, was covered with gold plates; the Spanish melted them down and built a monastery over the walls. The walls remained - earthquakes demolished the monastery several times, but not the Inca stones beneath it. We continue with the cathedral and San Pedro market, where we will have lunch.

In the afternoon we ascend to Sacsayhuamán, the fortress with zigzag walls made of hundred-ton blocks, fitted without mortar so precisely that not even a blade can fit between them. In the evening, San Blas, the artists' quarter, with steep streets and workshops.

A day on the road, but one of the most beautiful in South America. We stop at Andahuaylillas, the "Sistine Chapel of the Andes", a small village church with its interior entirely covered in paintings, and at Raqchi, the temple of Wiracocha, with its twenty-meter wall.

We cross the La Raya pass, at 4,335 meters — the highest point of the circuit, with vicuñas on the meadows and snow-capped peaks — and descend onto the altiplano, the treeless plateau, down to Puno, on the shore of Lake Titicaca. We stay on an island connected to the shore, with the lake all around.

By boat on the highest navigable lake in the world, at 3,800 meters. The first stop is at the Uros islands: about a hundred islands built from reeds, which the community rebuilds layer by layer, for centuries. You step on them and they sink a little beneath you. Houses, school and boats — all made from the same reeds.

We continue to Taquile, the island where men knit and where there are no cars or dogs. We climb the stone path to the village for lunch cooked by a family — lake trout and quinoa — with the dark blue lake below us and the Bolivian mountain range on the horizon.

We cross the border at Kasani and arrive at Copacabana, the pilgrimage town with its white Moorish-style basilica. From here, by boat, to Isla del Sol, the place where, according to legend, the god Wiracocha made the sun rise and where the first Incas were born: terraces, a temple, and a ridge path, with the lake on both sides.

In the afternoon, we head to La Paz: the bus crosses the Tiquina Strait on a barge, then we ascend the altiplano and suddenly descend into a city nestled in a huge crater, with the 6,400-meter Illimani behind it.

La Paz is the city with the largest cable car network in the world — eleven lines, instead of a subway, because the hills are too steep. We take two of them, up to El Alto, at 4,100 meters, from where the entire city can be seen, in the crater.

We walk down through the witches' market, with herbs, amulets and offerings for Pachamama, and pass by Valle de la Luna, a labyrinth of eroded rocks on the outskirts of the city. In the evening, a fifty-minute flight to Uyuni and the first night in the salt hotel.

The day worth the journey here. We set off in 4x4 cars past the train cemetery, steam locomotives rusted in the desert, and through Colchani, the village where salt is gathered in mounds. Then we enter the salar: ten thousand square kilometers of white, with the crust cracked into perfect hexagons, and the sky so blue that the horizon is no longer visible.

Lunch is on Isla Incahuasi, a rock island in the middle of the salt, covered with ten-meter cacti, a thousand years old. In the afternoon, the perspective photos that everyone knows — they can't be missed, there's nothing around to give scale — and the sunset on the salar, when the salt turns pink.

We exit the salt flat to the south, into Sud Lípez, the highest and most desolate region of Bolivia. The road passes by Ollagüe volcano, with active fumaroles, and reaches a series of lagoons at over 4,000 meters — Cañapa, Hedionda, Honda — each a different color, from turquoise to rusty, due to the minerals.

On all of them live colonies of flamingos, three species, pink on the green water, with snow-capped volcanoes in the background. Packed lunch on the shore of the lagoon, then we return to the salt hotel for the last night.

In the morning we fly from Uyuni to La Paz, from there to Lima, and in the evening we depart across the Atlantic to Amsterdam. We spend the night on the plane.

We land in Amsterdam in the afternoon and in Bucharest in the evening.