Bolivia

I arrived in La Paz from Lima on a night flight, and nothing had prepared me for stepping off the plane at El Alto airport — at 4,061 metres above sea level, the highest commercial airport in the world — and feeling my body simply refuse to cooperate. Not pain exactly, more like someone had turned the gravity dial up and the oxygen dial down at the same time. I sat in the taxi watching the city of La Paz reveal itself below in a crater of light, dense and vertical and implausible, and I thought: this place is serious.

La Paz is one of the strangest and most compelling cities I have passed through in years of travel. It makes no concessions to newcomers. The streets of the Witches’ Market — Mercado de las Brujas — sell dried llama foetuses, herbal remedies, incense bundles, and coca leaves with a completely straight face, because these are not tourist props but the materials of active spiritual practice. The cable cars crossing the sky above the city are genuinely the best urban transport I have ever used: cheap, fast, and offering views that no dedicated tourist attraction could match. I ate salteñas — those juicy, barely-manageable Bolivian pastries — at seven in the morning standing at a street counter, broth running down my wrist, and felt immediately at home.

But the reason most people come to Bolivia, and the reason they leave changed, is the Salar de Uyuni. I went at the tail end of the rainy season when a thin film of water covers the salt, transforming 10,000 square kilometres into a mirror. The effect is not just beautiful — it is destabilising. You drive across it and the horizon disappears, replaced by a seamless continuity of sky above and below, the truck appearing to float in a silver void. I have seen a lot of landscapes. I have seen very few that made me genuinely question what I was perceiving.

When to go: The rainy season (November to April) produces the famous mirror effect on the salt flat, but travel can be difficult and some roads become impassable. The dry season (May to October) gives you easier logistics, firmer ground, and the classic graphic salt hexagon patterns. May and June hit the sweet spot — the rains have just ended, some residual water remains, and the skies are sharply clear. Avoid August if you dislike wind.

What most guides get wrong: They treat the Salar as the whole story and rush past everything else. The altiplano between La Paz and Uyuni contains some of the most extraordinary and overlooked landscapes in South America: Eduardo Avaroa National Park with its coloured lagoons, flamingos feeding at altitude, smoking volcanoes, and geothermal fields that smell like the beginning of the world. Bolivia is also significantly cheaper than neighbouring Peru, which means you can take more time — and time is the one thing Bolivia absolutely requires.