Itinerary · for one

Bolivia · the high plateau

Eleven nights solo through the Bolivian altiplano in dry-season winter · two slow days in La Paz at 3,650 metres to acclimatise, the cable-car network threading the bowl of the city, the witches” market under San Francisco and Sunday cholita wrestling out in El Alto · two nights on Lake Titicaca at Copacabana for the ferry to Isla del Sol, sunrise from the Yumani steps, and the dark Virgin in her basilica · three nights at Uyuni for the train cemetery on the way in, two days on the salt with the hexagon polygons underfoot and Incahuasi”s thousand-year cacti, and a southern circuit out to Laguna Colorada”s flamingos, the geysers of Sol de Mañana, and a soak at Polques as the stars come out · two nights in white-walled Sucre, the constitutional capital, for Casa de la Libertad and the Cretaceous dinosaur prints at the cement quarry · and two final nights up at Potosí, 4,090 metres, for Casa de la Moneda and a sober walk through Cerro Rico with the ex-miners who still leave offerings to El Tío.

1 traveler 5 bases 11 nights 11 min read

v1 · May 12, 2026

Jul 10 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at El Alto. Then the thin air.

Into La Paz on a Saturday at 4,000 metres, the bowl of the city dropping away from the airport rim like a held breath. Eleven nights on the altiplano in the heart of austral winter — coca tea on arrival, two slow days to let the lungs catch up, then the cable cars over the brick canyons and the witches'' market under San Francisco. North to Lake Titicaca for sunrise on Isla del Sol and the dark Virgin of Copacabana. South to Uyuni for the salt flats in their dry-season hexagons, the cactus island, the flamingos on Laguna Colorada, and a night so clear the milky way casts shadows. Then white Sucre, the cradle of independence, and Potosí, the highest city of its size on earth, where Cerro Rico still bleeds silver.

Begin the journey ↓

Jul 10 → Jul 21 · 11 nights · 5 bases · 950 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Jul 10–11 Days 1–2

La Paz · the bowl in the sky

Two slow days to let the lungs catch up. Coca tea at 3,650 metres, brick canyons stacked up the bowl, the cable cars threading between them like a quiet metro in the sky.

2 nights

Fly HKG → LIM → LPB (El Alto, 4,061m) · arrival day is a do-nothing day

Altitude 3,650m at the hotel, 4,061m at the airport · soroche pills + coca tea, no alcohol day 1

Things to do

Mi Teleférico · the red, yellow and green lines stitched across the bowl · cheap, fast, and the best view of the city
Mercado de las Brujas · llama foetuses, amulets, dried herbs for offerings to Pachamama
Valle de la Luna · eroded clay badlands twenty minutes south of the city, golden hour walk on the boardwalks
San Francisco church and plaza · stone façade carved with mestizo-baroque mermaids and pumas
Salteñas at Paceña La Salteña for breakfast · juicy beef and potato hand-pies, eat them tip-down before they leak

Sleep low if you can · Sopocachi or Zona Sur sit a few hundred metres below the centre and make the first night easier · skip the gym, eat light, drink water

Bookings

flight HKG → LIM → LPB · arrival 2027-07-10 pending

LATAM or Avianca via Lima; arrival at El Alto early morning

hotel La Paz · 2 nights in Sopocachi for the altitude pending

Chapter 01 · the story

The plane lands at El Alto at 4,061m and the city is not visible. It is underneath — a bowl dropping four hundred metres off the rim, brick by brick, until the centre sits at 3,650m and the cable cars stitch the canyon back together.

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The first breath outside the terminal is the one the body remembers. The air is thin enough that the lungs work for it twice. The taxi crosses the lip of El Alto and the city appears all at once below — a bowl of red brick and concrete poured into a canyon, the snowcap of Illimani sitting on the far rim at 6,438m as casually as a wall. The descent into the centre takes twenty minutes of switchbacks and drops four hundred metres of altitude. The body notices.

By the second morning the cable car is the answer. Mi Teleférico runs eleven colour-coded lines across the bowl — red, yellow, green, blue, orange — and a single ride costs three bolivianos, less than the bus, and the view is everything the bus is not. The gondolas swing out over the canyon between rooftop laundry and satellite dishes and the long brown ladder of unfinished brick, and the city unfolds underneath like a topographic map you happen to be inside. Locals ride it to work; tourists ride it to look.

The Mercado de las Brujas on Calle Linares sells what La Paz still buys: amulets, dried herbs, llama foetuses wrapped in newspaper to be buried under the foundations of a new house as an offering to Pachamama. The transaction is matter-of-fact. The woman in the bowler hat weighs the fetus on a kitchen scale. Catholicism and Andean cosmology have shared this corner since 1548 and neither side is in a hurry to win.

On Sunday morning the minibuses up to El Alto fill with families heading to the cholitas luchadoras — Indigenous women in pollera skirts and bowler hats body-slamming each other in a ring above the market. It started as a wrestling spectacle and became something closer to a costume drama about who gets to be public in a country that spent four centuries pretending they weren’t.

Chapter 02 · Jul 12–13 Days 3–4

Lake Titicaca · the sacred water

The highest navigable lake on earth, indigo under a winter sky. Ferry across at first light to the island the Incas called the birthplace of the sun.

2 nights

Drive La Paz → Copacabana · ~155 km · ~4 hr with the Tiquina ferry crossing

Border Copacabana sits 8 km from Peru · passport at the lakefront if Isla del Sol's north side reopens

Things to do

Morning ferry to Isla del Sol · two hours across the indigo · land at Yumani in the south
Climb the Yumani steps · the Inca stairway up from the dock, eucalyptus and terraces, llamas grazing the ridge
Basilica of Our Lady of Copacabana · Moorish whitewash and the dark Virgin carved by a grandson of Inca Tupac Yupanqui
Sunset on Cerro Calvario · the stations of the cross up the hill behind town, lake going copper to violet
Trucha del lago grilled lakeside · rainbow trout farmed in the cold water, lemon and a beer at a plastic table

Isla del Sol's north end has been closed since the inter-community dispute · check on arrival in Copacabana whether the full island traverse is walkable or only the south end is open to visitors

Bookings

rental Private transfer La Paz → Copacabana · Tiquina ferry included pending

hotel Copacabana · 2 nights lakefront with breakfast pending

activity Isla del Sol day-ferry · Yumani landing · return same day pending

Chapter 02 · the story

Titicaca sits at 3,812m, the highest navigable lake on earth, and the Inca said the first human stepped onto Isla del Sol out of its water. The ferry crosses the indigo at dawn and the myth feels less mythical the closer you get.

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The boat leaves Copacabana harbour at 8:30am with no roof. There is a reason for this, and the reason becomes clear about ten minutes in: at 3,812m the sun is not filtered by very much atmosphere, and the lake under a winter sky is so blue it reads as a different element. The crossing takes two hours. The hat stays on the head. The water stays the same impossible indigo the whole way across, and the wind off it is the temperature of the snowline.

The landing at Yumani is a stone jetty at the foot of a near-vertical hillside terraced for a thousand years. The Yumani steps go straight up — 206 of them, dry-stone Inca masonry restored in pieces — to a fountain the locals call the Fountain of Youth, which delivers cold water from three spouts said to represent the Inca triad: ama sua, ama llulla, ama qhella. Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t be lazy. The lungs object to all three on the way up.

This is, according to the origin myth recorded by the chronicler Garcilaso, where Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo emerged from the water to found the Inca empire. The rock they came out of is on the north side of the island, a forty-minute walk along a ridge above terraced wheat. The community on the north has been in dispute with the community on the south since 2017 and the trail closes and reopens by the year. Ask at the dock.

Back in Copacabana the basilica is whitewashed Moorish, and inside sits the Virgen Morena — the dark Virgin carved in 1583 by Francisco Tito Yupanqui, grandson of an Inca emperor, in wood the colour of the lake at dusk. The fishermen still take their boats to be blessed on her feast day. The trout served at the lakeside stalls arrived from California in 1939 and stayed.

Chapter 03 · Jul 14–16 Days 5–7

Salar de Uyuni · the white sea

Ten thousand square kilometres of salt, cracked into hexagons in the dry-season cold. By night the milky way casts shadows on the white.

3 nights

Drive Copacabana → La Paz · ~3.5 hr by colectivo · morning of Jul 14 if taking the Uyuni flight

Fly La Paz → Uyuni · Amaszonas / BoA · ~1 hr · alternative is the overnight bus direct from La Paz or Copacabana

Tour 3-day 4×4 southern circuit · salt flats day 1, Siloli desert + lagunas day 2, geysers + Polques + border day 3

Things to do

Train cemetery at the edge of town · rusted British locomotives slowly eaten by the salt wind
Onto the salt at Colchani · hexagonal polygons stretching to the curvature of the earth
Incahuasi Island · thousand-year cacti rising off a coral reef petrified mid-flat
Laguna Colorada · borax-red water, three flamingo species feeding on the algae at 4,300m
Sol de Mañana geysers and Polques hot springs · dawn at the fumaroles, soak at sunrise

July is dry season — no mirror, but the salt is at its whitest and the southern circuit lagunas are at their most colour-saturated · nights at the refugios drop to −15°C · bring a four-season bag, sunglasses (snow-blindness is real), and enough cash for the Eduardo Avaroa park fee

Bookings

flight La Paz → Uyuni · 2027-07-14 morning pending

hotel Uyuni · night 1 in town, nights 2–3 in salt-block refugios on the southern circuit pending

activity 3-day 4×4 southern circuit · English-speaking driver · max 6 pax pending

Book a reputable operator — Red Planet, Quechua Connection, or Cordillera Traveller

Chapter 03 · the story

Ten thousand five hundred and eighty-two square kilometres of salt, flat to within a metre across the whole sheet. In wet season it mirrors the sky and the horizon dissolves. In dry season the surface cracks into hexagons and the silence becomes the loudest thing in the jeep.

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The four-by-four leaves Uyuni at 10am and passes the train cemetery first — a line of British steam locomotives rusting at the edge of town, abandoned in the 1940s when the mineral exports collapsed and the railway south to Antofagasta stopped paying. The salt wind has been eating them ever since. Kids climb on the boilers; the metal flakes off in red sheets.

Twenty minutes later the road ends and the salt begins. The Salar is 10,582 square kilometres — bigger than Lebanon, flatter than any other surface on the planet — and the first impression is that the horizon has been replaced. There is no edge. The hexagons crack across the white in a tile pattern that goes on for hours of driving. The eye loses scale and the photos that everyone takes here, the ones where someone tiny stands on someone giant’s hat, work because there is genuinely nothing in the frame to fix the size of anything.

Incahuasi rises out of the salt at the centre like a coral reef that forgot to drown. Its Echinopsis cacti are a thousand years old, three centimetres of growth per year, and the wind through them is the only sound for a kilometre in every direction. July is dry season, so the surface is hexagonal and white rather than mirrored and silver — the wet-season reflection works January through March, when a few centimetres of water turn the Salar into the largest mirror on earth. The trade-off is colour: the dry-season lagunas to the south are at their most saturated.

By the third dawn the jeep has crossed into the Eduardo Avaroa reserve. Laguna Colorada is borax-red at 4,278m, three flamingo species feeding on the algae that turns the water that colour. Sol de Mañana’s geysers vent at first light at 4,850m, mud bubbling at boiling in air that the body is barely managing. The Polques hot springs at sunrise are the reward for sleeping at minus fifteen.

Chapter 04 · Jul 17–18 Days 8–9

Sucre · the white city

Down off the altiplano into a colonial capital of whitewashed stucco and red tile. Independence was declared here in 1825 and the air is finally thick enough to run again.

2 nights

Drive Uyuni → Sucre · ~365 km · ~8 hr by shared van, or a short hop on BoA via Sucre Alcantarí

Altitude 2,810m · the first night with enough oxygen to sleep deeply since arrival

Things to do

Casa de la Libertad · the room where Simón Bolívar's lieutenants declared the republic in 1825
San Felipe Neri rooftop at golden hour · whitewashed bell towers stacked against the green hills
Parque Cretácico · 5,000+ dinosaur footprints on a near-vertical cement-quarry wall, the largest such site on earth
Sunday market at Tarabuco · 65 km out, Yampara weavers in the black-and-red montera, the best textiles in the Andes
Chorizo chuquisaqueño and a glass of singani at the Mercado Central · the local grape brandy, neat with a slice of lime

Sucre is the best altitude-recovery base on the route · use it · long lunch on a terraced rooftop, a real run in Parque Bolívar, an early night in a thicker air

Bookings

rental Shared van Uyuni → Sucre · daytime departure pending

hotel Sucre · 2 nights in the historic centre, rooftop preferred pending

activity Tarabuco Sunday market day-trip · if Jul 18 lands on a Sunday pending

Chapter 04 · the story

On 6 August 1825 Simón Bolívar's lieutenants signed Bolivia into existence in a small upstairs room in this whitewashed colonial town. The seat of government moved to La Paz seventy-four years later. The constitution did not. Sucre is still the legal capital.

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The descent from the altiplano takes most of a day and the body notices each thousand metres. By the time the road drops into Sucre’s valley at 2,810m the air is finally thick enough to run in, and after a week at four thousand the lungs file the difference as luxury. The colonial centre is whitewashed by municipal ordinance — every two years the façades get a fresh coat of lime — and the afternoon light off them is theatrical in a way no other city on this route has tried to be.

The Casa de la Libertad sits on Plaza 25 de Mayo, named for the date in 1809 when the first cry for South American independence was made here, sixteen years before the country actually existed. The room upstairs — the Salón de la Independencia — is small, parquet, with the original act of independence under glass and the desk where the document was signed. Outside, the plaza is full of children chasing pigeons under jacarandas.

Above the rooftops, the bell tower of the San Felipe Neri monastery is reached by a narrow staircase from the convent cloister, and opens at five for sunset. The view is the entire grid of red tile and white stucco against the green hills behind, with the dome of the metropolitan cathedral catching the last light. The chorizo chuquisaqueño sandwiches at the Mercado Central are eaten standing, and the singani — clear grape brandy distilled since the sixteenth century at altitude — is poured neat from a plastic bottle.

Out at Cal Orck’o, a cement quarry seven kilometres from the centre, five thousand dinosaur footprints run up a near-vertical wall of Cretaceous limestone — the largest single accumulation of tracks on earth. Tectonic uplift tipped a 68-million-year-old lakeshore ninety degrees in the last few million years. Theropods, sauropods, and one straight line of titanosaur prints that walks, impossibly, up the cliff.

Chapter 05 · Jul 19–20 Days 10–11

Potosí · the silver mountain

The highest city of its size on earth, 4,090 metres at the foot of a mountain that once bankrolled an empire. Cerro Rico still bleeds silver, and the miners still leave coca for El Tío.

2 nights

Drive Sucre → Potosí · ~165 km · ~3 hr · the climb back up onto the altiplano

Ethics the Cerro Rico mine tour is controversial · go only with an ex-miner-led cooperative, bring gifts (coca, dynamite, soft drinks) to the working tunnels

Things to do

Cerro Rico cooperative mine tour · helmet and headlamp, the offering to El Tío at the tunnel shrine, two hours underground at 4,300m
Casa de la Moneda · the royal mint where the Spanish empire pressed pieces of eight for three centuries
San Francisco bell tower · climb the spiral for the best view of the colonial grid and the Cerro looming red above it
Convento de Santa Teresa · the cloistered Carmelites, the dowry portraits, the rotating turnstile through the grille
K'ala phurka soup at a Mercado Central stall · a volcanic stone dropped in the bowl makes it boil at the table

Back to altitude — Potosí is higher than Lhasa · take it slow on arrival, the climb to San Francisco's bell tower will tell you what your lungs think · the mine tour is physically demanding and ethically heavy, not a bucket-list tick

Bookings

rental Shared van Sucre → Potosí · morning departure pending

hotel Potosí · 2 nights in a restored colonial casona near the plaza pending

activity Cerro Rico cooperative mine tour · ex-miner guide · 4 hr pending

Big Deal Tours or Koala Tours — both run by former miners

flight Potosí → Sucre → Santa Cruz → HKG · departure 2027-07-21 pending

Chapter 05 · the story

Cerro Rico bankrolled the Spanish empire for three centuries and killed an estimated eight million Indigenous and African miners doing it. The mountain is still working. The cooperatives still leave coca and cigarettes for El Tío at the tunnel shrine.

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The road up from Sucre climbs back onto the altiplano and the lungs remember. Potosí sits at 4,090m at the foot of a single mountain the colour of old brick, and on first sight the proportion is wrong — Cerro Rico is enormous, conical, almost too symmetrical, looming over a colonial grid that is itself the highest city of its size on earth. The mountain was discovered to be one of the richest silver veins in human history in 1545. Within a century Potosí had two hundred thousand people and rivalled Paris.

The Casa de la Moneda — the royal mint, three city blocks of seventeenth-century stone — is where the silver became pieces of eight, the first global currency. The wooden machinery for rolling silver ingots into coin strips is still in place, ox-driven, scaled for animals to walk in circles for ten-hour shifts. The mint operated until 1953. The Spanish phrase vale un Potosí — worth a Potosí — entered the language to mean priceless, and was literal.

The cost was paid by the Indigenous miners conscripted under the mita labour system and by African slaves shipped across an ocean to a city three vertical miles above the sea. The historian Eduardo Galeano put the death toll at eight million across three hundred years. The mountain is now hollow — over five hundred kilometres of tunnels, the summit subsiding by metres per decade — and still being worked by some fifteen thousand cooperative miners, mostly for tin and zinc, occasionally for the silver veins the Spanish missed.

The tour goes in with an ex-miner as guide. The offering at the tunnel shrine is for El Tío — the horned figure painted on the rock, part devil, part Pachamama’s consort, the one the miners say owns the inside of the mountain. Coca leaves, a cigarette, a splash of 96% cane alcohol on the ground. Above ground the Cerro is owned by the state. Below it, the bargain is older than the state, and the miners are clear about which one is keeping them alive.

Jul 21 · Day 12 · the last one

Last salteña on the plaza. Then the long flight north.

A final morning in Potosí, the bell tower of San Francisco above red tile and white stucco, the Cerro a rust-coloured shadow against the winter sky. Coca tea on the plaza, salteñas wrapped in paper for the road. Down off the altiplano by bus to Sucre, the short hop to Santa Cruz, the long-haul out. Eleven nights — the salt still on the boots, the taste of llajwa still on the tongue, the altitude already letting go.

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