Arriving Like a Feral Cat
La Paz hit me like a brick wrapped in thin air. Stepping off the plane at El Alto—the world's highest international airport at 4,150 metres—I spent the first twenty minutes wheezing like a deflating whoopee cushion and wondering why I'd skipped the whole "acclimatise gradually" suggestion. My lungs felt like they'd been wrapped in cling film. My head pounded. Brilliant start, Roo.
I grabbed a minibus into the city proper, crammed between a woman with six chickens in a mesh bag and a bloke eating a pasty the size of a small child. Welcome to Bolivia, mate.
That first evening, I wandered La Paz's narrow streets in a daze—the city tiered down a valley like someone had just dropped urban chaos into a canyon and let gravity sort it out. Graffiti murals screaming in Aymara. Cable cars strung between neighbourhoods like broken teeth. Cholita women in bowler hats and layered skirts haggling in markets that smelled of charcoal and possibility. I was utterly lost, which is precisely where I needed to be.
Eating My Way to the Soul of a City
After a day of acclimatisation (mostly spent horizontal), I finally had the oxygen capacity to think straight. That's when I booked Discovering the Ajayu/Soul of La Paz Discovering the Ajayu/Soul of La Paz, a five-hour cultural deep-dive run by a bloke named Cristobal who actually gave a damn about his city beyond making a buck.
We started—and I loved this—with a three-course meal. None of that tourist "sample the local flavours" nonsense. Actual food, eaten slowly, in a proper restaurant, with Cristobal explaining the lineage of every dish. We had quinoa soup that tasted like the Andes themselves, charque (dried beef that could survive a nuclear winter), and fresh trout that hadn't existed in my mouth five minutes prior.
After feeding our faces, Cristobal hauled us up the Mi Teleférico cable cars to El Alto. The views were absolutely mental—this sprawling, ramshackle city spreading across the high plains, with snow-capped peaks rising beyond. We stood there silently for a minute, which is rare for tourists, and Cristobal didn't ruin it with trivia. He just let us absorb the altitude and the scale of it all.
Then we descended—literally and metaphorically—into the old city's colonial heart. Narrow streets, churches with golden interiors, markets where old women sold everything from coca leaves to mysterious powders I definitely didn't ask about. Cristobal took us into Indigenous markets most tourists miss, explained the cholita culture without condescension, and taught me that "ajayu" actually means soul—and that's exactly what the tour was really about.
Death Wish on Two Wheels
By day three, my lungs had mostly adapted and my brain had thawed. Confidence flooding back, I made what I now recognise as a questionable decision: I booked Bike Down the Road of Death Bike Down the Road of Death.
Yes, that's its actual name. No, this is not a metaphor.
The Road of Death—or Camino de la Muerte—is Bolivia's most infamous stretch of gravel, a winding mountain pass that's allegedly killed hundreds over the years. It's also become a weird pilgrimage for adrenaline junkies and fools like me. You start at nearly 5,000 metres in the high Andes and descend 3,500 metres in a single morning, pedalling from windswept grassland through misty cloud forest and down into actual rainforest.
Our guide was a Serbian bloke named Dragan with the demeanour of a man who'd seen every possible way a tourist could die on a bicycle and had simply made peace with it. He briefed us—don't brake too hard, don't lean too far, if you're going over a cliff at least have the decency to scream so we know where to find your body. Motivational stuff.
The first hour was manageable. Scenic, even. Rolling down through eucalyptus forests, switchbacks that weren't (yet) terrifying, views of the valley dropping away in a way that made your stomach interesting.
Then the road got properly mental.
Cliffs with no guardrails (naturally). Gravel that shifted like sand. Sections where the "road" was maybe two metres wide and you were essentially riding a bike on top of a mountain edge whilst gravity screamed suggestions. I was terrified and exhilarated in equal measure, which I think is the point. Waterfalls cascaded past us. The air got thicker, warmer, greener. Within four hours, I'd gone from tundra to tropics on a bike, half-braking, half-praying, entirely alive.
We reached Coroico (a charming colonial town at the bottom) around midday, covered in dust, laughing at how we'd somehow survived, and already planning to pretend we'd never done anything that stupid again.
Salt Flats and Existential Crisis
After nearly dying on a mountain road, the salt flats seemed like a reasonable next move. Peaceful. Flat. Free of cliffs.
I spent a night in Uyuni—a utilitarian mining town that smells vaguely of diesel and dreams—before heading out early for the Salar de Uyuni Tour 1 day with Sunset Salar de Uyuni Tour 1 day with Sunset. Ten thousand square kilometres of pure white salt, stretching to every horizon like someone had spilled milk across the earth's surface.
Our 4x4 bounced across the flats with a driver called Jorge and three other tourists—a retired Canadian couple and a anxious French girl. For the first couple hours, it felt like being on a different planet. The salt crust is so white and uniform that your sense of scale completely breaks. A small rock looks like it's kilometres away. Your own vehicle becomes just another speck in infinite whiteness.
We visited a small island called Incahuasi, where jumbo cacti grew out of the salt like some surrealist's fever dream. Then came the cemetery of trains—rusted locomotives abandoned by the railway company in the 1950s, now monuments to industrial obsolescence, oxidising slowly in the dry air.
But the real moment came at sunset. The sky turned pink, then orange, then deep crimson. And because of the salt's reflectivity during certain seasons, it created this effect where the sky simply mirrored itself beneath us. For about twenty minutes, we weren't driving across a flat expanse—we were floating through clouds. The horizon disappeared. Perspective ceased to exist. The Canadian bloke actually teared up, which didn't feel inappropriate.
I'd come to Bolivia for moments like that—where the world reveals itself as genuinely weird and magnificent and utterly indifferent to your presence.
Back to the Real, With Potatoes
After three days of high-altitude chaos and existential reflection, I needed something grounding. I headed to Cochabamba—the third-largest city, less touristy than La Paz, somehow more genuinely Bolivian—and booked myself into Adelante Mujer Bolivian Cooking Workshops Adelante Mujer Bolivian Cooking Workshops.
I walked into a home kitchen run by three Indigenous women who treated cooking the way I treat breathing—as a fundamental act of survival and love. For three hours, I peeled potatoes with a knife (they taught me the proper technique, which involves a wrist motion that feels medieval), learned to make papas a la huancaína (spiced potatoes in a creamy sauce that genuinely changed my understanding of what potatoes could do), and prepared a proper three-course Bolivian meal.
But here's the thing about Adelante Mujer—it's not just about food. It's a cooperative run to support Indigenous women, and you're literally learning from the people who've been making this food their entire lives. There's no pretence, no "cooking demo for tourists" vibe. They're teaching you because they want you to know how to make proper food, and maybe you'll go home and tell people that Bolivian cuisine is more than just llama steaks and mystery soups.
We ate what we'd cooked, sitting around a small table, and one of the women—Marisol—told me about her daughters, her struggles, her dreams. And I realised I'd been so caught up in collecting experiences that I'd forgotten why we travel in the first place. It's not for the photos or the stories. It's to sit across from another human and recognise that they're just as complex, as funny, as fragile, as you are.
The Ghost of One Last Option
Before I left Uyuni, I'd seen another option that nagged at me: the Private Uyuni Salt Flats Full-Day Circuit from Uyuni Private Uyuni Salt Flats Full-Day Circuit from Uyuni. Same location, but eight hours instead of one, and supposedly with just your small group instead of a bus full of tourists.
I didn't do it. My flights were booked, my budget was screaming, and honestly, I'd already had my moment in the salt. But talking to Maz—a Global Hobo staffer who'd done it—he described eight hours of blinding white, mirror-flat reflections during the rainy season, and that particular emptiness where you're so far from any reference point that your brain genuinely struggles to process space. It sounded perfect and absolutely mad.
Maybe next time. Bolivia will still be here, the salt flats aren't going anywhere, and there's always another flop-worthy decision to make.
Final Thoughts
I left Bolivia fitter, poorer, and exponentially richer in the ways that actually matter. My flip-flops are gone (lost them somewhere between El Alto and Cochabamba, naturally). My lungs are stronger. My understanding of what's possible on a mountain road has been thoroughly tested and my understanding of what's possible in a kitchen has been delightfully upended.
Bolivia doesn't owe you anything. It won't reduce itself to fit your Instagram feed. It'll make you climb stairs at 4,000 metres while barely breathing, feed you food that tastes like heritage, scare you on a downhill bike ride, and then show you salt flats that make you question whether you're actually awake.
That's kind of the whole point.
