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Part of my 10 Days in Peru with Kids series. Catch up on What I’d Pack Differently first.

Turning 10 in Cusco was never the plan when we booked this trip, it just happened to land there once the dates came together. It turned into one of my favorite days of the entire ten days.

Morning in San Blas

We started in the San Blas neighborhood, all cobblestone streets and artisan shops, with a slow, unhurried birthday breakfast to kick things off. No alarms, no itinerary to rush toward, just coffee and good food and the day ahead of us. From there, we spent a long stretch of the morning shopping through the little shops in San Blas, which felt like the right way to let a 10-year-old pick out her own souvenirs instead of us choosing for her. She landed on a crocheted llama wearing tiny glasses and a handful of water bottle stickers, and watching her take her time deciding was half the fun.

Horseback Riding

Our guide picked us up from the Wyndham at 1:00 PM for a horseback riding excursion booked through Airbnb. It’s about a 20-minute drive out to the ranch, and traffic through Cusco can slow that down, so building in a little buffer before pickup time is worth it.

I need to be honest here: neither my daughter nor I are horse people. Riding anything is not our jam, and we both went into this expecting to grit our teeth through it for the birthday of it all. Instead, it turned into one of our family’s favorite experiences of the entire trip.

Our guide stayed with my daughter the entire ride, giving her his full attention the whole time. His English and our Spanish both left something to be desired, and some of her questions got lost somewhere in translation, but listening to the two of them work it out together, guessing at words, laughing when something didn’t quite land, was honestly one of the most fun parts of the afternoon. He led us out along ancestral trails with sweeping views over the Cusco Valley, stopping at the “Inka’s Face” natural rock formation and Inkilltambo, and at the Moon Temple, where he walked us through the history, the ancient rites, and Andean cosmovision behind the sites with the depth of someone who researches this seriously. It closed with a quieter, more reflective stop on Pachamama and the Andean concept of “anima” before we headed back into the city.

At the end of the ride, our guide’s uncle showed up to help barn the horses, and we ended up chatting with him too. That’s the thing about these trips that I keep coming back to: the people are what make the whole thing so special, not just the sights.

It’s a highly rated experience (4.99 out of 5 stars from over 1,500 reviews), and it earned that rating. It was a genuinely different kind of activity for the trip, part horseback ride, part history lesson, part something closer to a spiritual reset, and a great fit for a birthday afternoon after a run of big-hike, early-wake-up days. I came away actually having loved it, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a horseback ride.

Dessert Crawl

We closed the day with a birthday dessert crawl through Cusco, stopping at a couple of local favorites. After a trip full of big hikes, early wake-ups, and long travel days, an evening built entirely around dessert and no schedule felt like exactly the right way to celebrate.

Why This Day Worked

Looking back, the days that worked best on this trip were the ones with one clear anchor activity and room to wander around it. Slow birthday breakfast, one booked activity, then unstructured time to shop and eat. No early wake-up, no rushing between stops. After Machu Picchu and the mountain day before it, everyone, especially the birthday girl, needed a day like this.

If your own trip lines up with a birthday, I’d build the day the same way: pick one memorable activity, keep the rest loose, and let the day breathe.

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Next in this series: Our Favorite Peru Guides & Operators