Where to go in Latin America after you have done Peru

The mistake after Peru is choosing something that rhymes with it.

Peru is ruins, mountains and altitude. Book another trip built the same way and the second one will feel like a lesser version of the first. The travellers who come back happiest are the ones who deliberately changed the register — went to wildlife, or to food, or to a landscape that looks nothing like the Andes.

In short

• Costa Rica, 18 days — the biggest change of register. Wildlife, rainforest, coast, low altitude
• Mexico, 15 days — three ancient civilisations rather than one, and the best food on this list
• Ecuador & Galápagos, 15 days — wildlife you can walk up to, and a week in the islands
• Peru, Bolivia & Chile, 23 days — if the Andes were the point, this is the full version
• All are land-only and run on guaranteed departures

This is the one we suggest most often, because it is the furthest from what you have just done.

No altitude to speak of. No archaeology. Eighteen days of rainforest, cloud forest, volcanoes and two coastlines, with wildlife as the reason you are there rather than a bonus — the resplendent quetzal at San Gerardo de Dota, Corcovado's monkeys, macaws and sloths, the canopy at Monteverde, and the reef and mangrove at Cahuita.

It is also the gentler trip: no internal flights, short distances, and a pace that lets you stop. After a fortnight of Andean early starts, several travellers tell us that is the appeal.

The full route is set out in eighteen days in Costa Rica.

The obvious instinct after Peru is more archaeology, and Mexico is the right way to have it — because it is not one culture repeated.

Teotihuacán predates the Aztecs, who found it already abandoned. Oaxaca is Zapotec and Mixtec, with its own languages and script. Palenque and Chichén Itzá are Maya, and separated from each other by centuries and several hundred miles. Then the Spanish arrival sits on top of all of it, which is why Puebla and Mérida belong on the itinerary rather than interrupting it.

Mexico also has, by some distance, the best food on this page — a cooking class with local families in Oaxaca, an alebrije workshop with the carvers, markets and mezcal.

The first days are high, around 2,200 metres in Mexico City, but far milder than Cusco, and the Yucatán at the end is at sea level. Fifteen days in Mexico has the route day by day.

Our Ecuador route gives the islands seven full days, and does it land-based — you sleep on the islands rather than in a cabin, which removes the seasickness that puts a good number of people off the cruise format.

The first five days are Andean — Quito, the Quilotoa crater, Cotopaxi and the market at Otavalo — so there is a high section, though a shorter one than Peru's. Then the islands: snorkelling in clear water, giant tortoises, lava tunnels, volcanic islets and beaches where the animals genuinely do not move away from you.

It is the trip on this page that least resembles ordinary travel. See Galápagos: cruise or land-based for the format question.

Some people come back from Peru wanting more of exactly that, and for them the answer is the 23-day Peru, Bolivia and Chile route.

It covers Peru properly — Lima, Nazca, Arequipa, the Colca Canyon, Cuzco, the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu — and then crosses into Bolivia for Lake Titicaca, La Paz and the Uyuni salt flats, before finishing among the geysers, lagoons and moon landscapes of Chile's Atacama Desert.

Be clear-eyed about it: this is the highest trip we run, it is three weeks and a bit, and it spends serious time at altitude rather than passing through. If Peru's altitude troubled you at all, this is the wrong one. If it did not, it is the natural continuation — see Peru alone or the Andean trilogy and what the Uyuni salt flats are really like.

All four trips are land-only, take a maximum of 12 to 15 travellers, and run on guaranteed departures.