travelling peru.

[sooziepoosie]

how long would it take to travel the length of peru?

[Hippy]

Legth pf Peru aprox 1,288 miles. Light travells at 186,000 miles per second.

Peru is not flat (big range of mountains called Andes make sure of that), so if you tried to shine your light along a fibre optic cable draped over the ground then the length would be more as there are ups and downs to take into account. However if you have a light on the end of a high tower at one end of Peru and a light detector on another high tower at the other end of the country we are talking straight lines.

In this case 1,288 divided by 186,000 equals 0.007 to three decimal places. So that's seven thousandths of a second. Faster than the eye can see? Well almost!

[Hippy]

I read "light" where there was none. Sorry.

If you mean travel by road then you start inland at the Equator and then head southwest to the coast and then along there for about a thousand miles and finally end at Tacna in the south. Travelling by car you might get about 250 miles per day, donkey or horse about 90 - 100 miles a day, by helicopter maybe 500 miles per day. There are no direct rail links from the northermost point, but you might get from Talara in the north to Tacna at about 300 miles per day tops. So, approximatley:

Horse / donkey = about a fortnight

Car = about five days

Train = four and a quarter days

Helicopter = two and a half days

Hope this helps.

[Clanad]

Travelling in Peru is quite a bit slower than the speed of light... the major highways in Peru are the Panamericana (Pan-American Highway), which runs along the entire coast of Peru, and the Carretera Central, which runs from Lima to Huancayo and from there to the central jungle. Driving on either is an adventure, to say the least.  But, if one were to drive the PanAmerican from border to border, it could be done in a week... with all the luck and good weather and no banditos... with a really good command of Spanish as spoken in Peru. Busses do make the trip, but that's an entirely different story, not for the faint of heart. Be sure to learn the Peruvian National Anthem title "Somos libres, se�moslo siempre" ...

[Will__]

Well, I�ve done it. Couple of years ago my girlfriend and I travelled all over South America.

My question is what's the hurry? You can't really do anything urgently there since after all, it is Peru, and anyway, if you hurry, you miss the single most amazing place on the planet (in my book) - Machu Picchu and of course Cusco, and then the Nazca Lines, and the Paracas Peninsular......etc etc.

Plus there are a couple of valleys in Peru that you absolutely should not ever go to unless you want to meet some people who would think nothing of offing you just for being there (coke valleys) Sounds melodramatic, yeah, but this is Peru, not Peckham.....