How to avoid altitude sickness while traveling Peru?
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How to avoid altitude sickness while traveling Peru?
Cusco and the Sacred Valley are high-altitude regions, with Cusco at an elevation of around 3,400m/11,150ft. Travelers need to acclimatize to high altitudes to avoid or altitude sickness.
It usually takes two to three days to acclimatize fully to high altitude for people arriving from sea level. Altitude sickness tends to come due to rapidly ascending altitude and is typically caused by people moving around and behaving as they would at sea level immediately after arriving at high elevations, so, for example, traveling from Lima to Cusco will most likely get you sick.
To avoid getting sick you should only be moving up by about 1000 feet per night.
It usually takes two to three days to acclimatize fully to high altitude for people arriving from sea level. Altitude sickness tends to come due to rapidly ascending altitude and is typically caused by people moving around and behaving as they would at sea level immediately after arriving at high elevations, so, for example, traveling from Lima to Cusco will most likely get you sick.
To avoid getting sick you should only be moving up by about 1000 feet per night.
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I'm not responding explicitly to the original post, but I feel obliged to warn other readers that informal travel forums, like this one, are not good sources for medical advice. The problems with altitude sickness are that first, in extreme cases, it can be serious and even fatal; and second, people vary greatly in their susceptibility. You should seek in-person advice from a physician before assuming anything about how you, personally, will respond to high altitudes.
As far as I can tell -- and I'm not a physician -- the original post is decent general advice, though I would not have written that travelling from Lima to Cusco will "most likely" make you sick (perhaps the original poster has statistics from a qualified source); I might just have said, incontestably, that such a trip "may" make you sick. But even when reading decent general advice, keep in mind that you may not be one of the "general" cases.
As far as I can tell -- and I'm not a physician -- the original post is decent general advice, though I would not have written that travelling from Lima to Cusco will "most likely" make you sick (perhaps the original poster has statistics from a qualified source); I might just have said, incontestably, that such a trip "may" make you sick. But even when reading decent general advice, keep in mind that you may not be one of the "general" cases.
Last edited by Faedus; Jul 9th, 2022 at 03:27 PM.