Cusco to Puno by Bus and Train

Travelers who enter Peru through Bolivia tend to travel from Puno to Cusco, while those who enter through Lima do the same trip in reverse, after first visiting Machu Picchu. There are several buses working the Cusco-Puno route, offering direct overnight trips and day trips with guided stops at sites of interest along the way. You shouldn’t have any trouble contracting your transport from Cusco, although you will have a lot of options to choose from:

You can purchase a direct ticket from well-known companies such as   are comfortable, offering semi-reclinable (semi-cama) and reclinable (cama) seats, snacks and coffee. All of these buses leave Cusco or Puno in the evening and continue overnight. If you don’t mind missing the scenery, you save on a night’s lodging and make the trip pass much faster. Tickets on these buses cost more than those for local buses, but as trips are so long most travelers opt for the extra expense in hopes that the more comfortable seats make the trip bearable, and even restful.

If you’d rather travel during the day and stop for a buffet lunch, natural lookouts, and small archeological sites, a service like the Sun Route is for you. It’s called the Sun Route because the royal Incas considered themselves the children of the sun, and traced their ancestry to a legendary couple which emerged from the waters of Lake Titicaca near Puno and traveled to Cusco to found the empire. These buses stop at the small town of Andahuaylillas for a visit to San Pedro Church (the ‘Sistine Chapel of the Andes’), at the Raqchi ruins, La Raya lookout, at the Pucara museum and ruins, at a ceramics and metalworking studio, and at Sicuani for a buffet lunch. The bus and service quality is the same as that mentioned above (what’s considered ‘tourist class’ in Peru). When passing the small town of Chuta near Cusco, they’ll offer you a sample of the famed one-foot round loaves of sweet Chuta bread.

Along the way, you’ll see plenty of fields patchworked into family-owned plots covered with subsistence crops and many little Andean towns with mudbrick homes and dirt and cobblestone streets. Colorfully dressed locals tend to gather at the river to wash their clothes, fish, and to let their animals drink.

You can contract these two services online, or at the Cusco bus terminal. There, you’ll also find a third option: the cheapest tickets are the local buses, which aren’t actually direct trips as they do make stops along the way for passengers to board or disembark. These don’t have the same security as other buses, so you need to keep a close watch on your belongings- even if you keep your bag between your legs, you might be caught unaware by a bag-slasher in the seat behind you. Also, because Juliaca, the nearest city to Puno, is a smuggling capital dealing in a wide range of cheap goods from Bolivia (such as counterfeit sneakers, cigarettes, kitchenware….), a lot of smugglers take local buses from Puno to Cusco. To avoid detection during routine checks, they are known to disperse their goods among passengers, meaning one might ask you to cover yourself with various blankets or store a box under your seat. These buses are also subject to varied searches for this reason. It’s not dangerous, but it’s an uncomfortable situation and an inconvenience that travelers who opt for local buses contend with.

On all of the buses, locals might occasionally board to sell drinks and snacks. By all means, sample some if you’re hungry or thirsty. Be wary of fried foods such as papas rellenas (stuffed potatoes), however, as they are magnets for bacteria once they cool down to a certain temperature range….this can mean one very uncomfortable trip as the bus winds along its hilly route. (Here, I speak from bitter experience.)

If you have the money to spare, consider foregoing the buses altogether and splurging on the train. The Cusco-Puno route by train is a wonder in itself, and has won numerous travel awards as South America’s Leading Luxury Train and as one of the 20 best train trips in the world. This isn’t due solely to the train itself, but to the beauty of the route it takes during its 10 hour trip. (You might be surprised to know that the buses with guided stops actually only take 9.5 hours total.) Along the way, you see the Andean mountain range, the towers of Oropesa church, rural Andahuaylillas, the market at Juliaca, and sights like La Raya, which was mentioned earlier. It ends with a sunset view of Lake Titicaca. With a ‘panoramic’ car with windows all along the sides and roof, folkloric music and dance presentations, and pisco sour classes, you won’t lack for entertainment. The service in general is obviously a lot more luxurious, with gourmet Peruvian food and cocktails, although you’ll certainly pay more for the privilege…