Fit & Flow: A Week of Yoga, Hiking & Real Food in Sacred Valley, Peru

The week runs Sunday to Sunday. You land in Cusco, where a driver meets you at the airport and takes you down into the valley to the lodge — roughly an hour's drive, at a lower altitude than Cusco, which helps with the adjustment. The first evening is dinner and a short, gentle floor-based class to stretch out from the flight, then an early night.

From Monday the rhythm is fixed: 7am yoga for 75 minutes, breakfast at 8:30, hike at 9:30, back for lunch at 1pm. Afternoon is free. The second class is at 5:30pm, usually yin, restorative or a long savasana with a guided meditation, then dinner at 7.

The hikes are the part people remember. Midweek you walk up to a set of lesser-visited Inca ruins above the valley — three hours of switchbacks, lunch eaten sitting on the terraces — and another day you follow the Urubamba river to the Maras salt pans, a patchwork of shallow salt pools that have been worked since Inca times. One hike goes up to a small lake at around 3,400m where the group usually swims (briefly, it's cold) before walking back down. The pace is set by whoever is slowest, and the guide carries a radio and an oxygen cylinder in case the altitude bites.

Cooking is done by a local family who run the kitchen. Lunch and dinner are vegetarian — quinoa soups, grilled corn, beans, big salads, a very good roasted squash dish people ask for the recipe of — with fish available twice a week. Breakfast is fruit, eggs, bread and coffee. If you're vegan or gluten-free, tell them when you book and it's fine; a coeliac guest is easy, dairy-free is easy.

The yoga teacher, Mariela, trained in Cusco and has been teaching in the valley for eleven years. She teaches in English and Spanish, mostly vinyasa in the morning and gentle yin at night, and she's good at adjusting for people with stiff hips or bad knees. She'll also skip the class if only two people want it and take you on an extra walk instead.

What makes this different from a generic yoga-holiday is that nothing is cushioned. The lodge is comfortable but it's not a five-star resort — hot water runs on solar, wifi works in the dining room only, and the road up is unpaved. In exchange you get a valley with almost no other tourists in it on a weekday, and a price that is about half what the same week costs at a luxury place in the same region.

What's included

- 7 nights accommodation in shared or private rooms - 3 meals daily (vegetarian, fish twice a week) - Daily morning yoga class (75-90 minutes) - Daily evening yoga, yin or meditation class - Guided hikes on five of the seven days - Picnic lunch on the salt pans hike - Airport transfer from and to Cusco - Mats, blocks, straps and bolsters in the shala - Sauna access most evenings - Coffee-farm walk and tasting

What's not included

- International and domestic flights - Travel insurance - Massages and spa treatments - Optional taxi trips (e.g. to Pisac market) - Optional cooking class - Machu Picchu add-on or extension nights - Drinks and personal expenses