The Setup: Why Bolivia?
It started with an email. Our editor, a gremlin disguised as a project manager, decided that instead of our usual solo wandering, the Global Hobo crew should actually converge somewhere mad for a proper expedition. Bolivia was voted in after someone mentioned salt flats, and after someone else mentioned the food, and after Saskia made a joke about a "Road of Death" that the rest of us took way too seriously.
We were five: Ngaio (photographer, caffeine addict), Delphine (food obsessive, French-Canadian, perpetually lost), Saskia (adventure sports correspondent, terrifyingly fearless), Tomás (culture guy, knows seventeen facts about every city), and me—Roo, the bloke who'd lose his own flip-flops if they weren't attached to my feet.
We met in La Paz on a Tuesday morning, hungover and confused about the altitude.
Day One: Mirror Flat and Existential Crisis
Tomás insisted we do the proper introduction-to-Bolivia experience first. He'd somehow arranged "Discovering the Ajayu/Soul of La Paz" Discovering the Ajayu/Soul of La Paz, and I'll be honest—I went in expecting the usual "look at this historical building, now look at this other historical building" rubbish.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
We started with a three-course meal in someone's home—a real family kitchen, not a tourist trap—where a bloke explained La Paz's history whilst we ate salteñas that were still steaming. Then the cable car ride up to El Alto. Now, cable cars in La Paz are mad enough when you're solo; surrounded by four other crew members photographing your terrified face, it's biblical. The city just unfolds beneath you like someone's knocked over a toy box of houses.
Down into the colonial streets. Up through markets that smell like diesel and hope. By the time we finished, we'd walked ten kilometres and made a mental note: Tomás knows what he's doing.
But we didn't come to La Paz for La Paz. We came for the white.
Day two we bailed early, caught a flight to Uyuni, and by late afternoon were in a jeep heading toward the Salar de Uyuni Tour 1 day with Sunset Salar de Uyuni Tour 1 day with Sunset. Our guide, a bloke named Miguel who'd seen about ten thousand tourists stare at salt in bewilderment, didn't bother with the small talk.
Ten thousand square kilometres. That's not a statistic when you're standing on it. That's your brain breaking.
Ngaio was making weird happy sounds with her camera. Delphine kept saying "c'est pas possible" in a loop. Saskia just kept walking further out, refusing to acknowledge that she was literally standing on an alien planet. Tomás was explaining the geological formation to nobody in particular. I was trying to work out if the ground was real.
The sunset was the sort of thing that makes you understand why people used to believe in gods. The sky went orange, then pink, then colours that don't have names. The salt beneath our feet turned into a mirror, and suddenly there was no horizon—just infinite sky in every direction. Ngaio cried a bit. We all pretended not to notice.
That night, back in Uyuni town, we got absolutely trolleyed on singani and made increasingly terrible decisions about the following morning.
Day Three: The Road of Death (Or: Saskia's Greatest Hits)
Saskia wanted to do Bike Down the Road of Death Bike Down the Road of Death. This seemed fine on paper. On paper, you're not actually plummeting down a mountain.
The morning we showed up at the starting point—3,500 metres up, mist so thick you couldn't see your own handlebars—I understood why it had that name. It wasn't hyperbole. It was documentation.
Saskia, obviously, was in her element. Delphine looked green. Tomás was making a spreadsheet of risk mitigation in his head (I could tell by his face). Ngaio was filming everything. I was contemplating my mortality.
Then we started moving.
You drop out of the Andes like someone's opened the earth. The mist clears, the vegetation gets thicker, and suddenly you're carving through cloud forest with gravity doing most of the steering. There are waterfalls. There are cliffsides. There are moments when you're fairly certain you've made a catastrophic error in life choices.
Saskia rode like she was born on a downhill bike. Halfway through, she stopped to help someone fix a chain (because of course). Delphine screamed continuously for ninety minutes but somehow stayed upright. Tomás went full zen. Ngaio almost dropped her camera into a ravine and didn't even flinch. I ate dirt twice and still managed to make it to the rainforest alive.
By the bottom—thousands of metres below where we'd started—we were laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. The kind of laughter that only comes when you've collectively faced down your mortality and won.
Day Four: Cooking Class and Kitchen Philosophy
Delphine had been counting down the days to Adelante Mujer Bolivian Cooking Workshops Adelante Mujer Bolivian Cooking Workshops. We were in Cochabamba by then, and honestly, I thought this was the day the crew would get bored.
Instead, a woman named Marcela opened a kitchen and changed something fundamental about all of us.
It wasn't just about cooking—though Delphine learned to peel potatoes with a knife in this old-school way that seemed genuinely revolutionary. It was three hours of Marcela teaching us traditional Bolivian recipes, but more than that, it was Marcela talking about her daughter, about how she learned from her mother, about how food is the thing that stays true when everything else gets weird.
We made a three-course meal from scratch: soups with potatoes and chiles, a main with local herbs we'd never heard of, dessert that involved more patience than I knew I possessed. And we ate it together at a long table, and somewhere between the first course and the coffee, we stopped being a work crew and started being something else.
Saskia asked Marcela how many tourists came through. Marcela said the number was growing, but what mattered was that people showed up willing to learn, to listen, to sit down and respect the food.
Delphine didn't say much. She just took notes.
Day Five: The Private Uyuni Circuit (When You Get the Salt Flat to Yourself)
Maz joined us for the last leg—our photographer from the main office, flying in to document the whole adventure. He wanted the Salar de Uyuni experience, but fuller, deeper, alone.
We did the Private Uyuni Salt Flats Full-Day Circuit from Uyuni Private Uyuni Salt Flats Full-Day Circuit from Uyuni, and eight hours with just our guide, one jeep, and nobody else meant something different from the sunset tour.
This was the salt flat in its full absurdity. The mirror effect at different angles. The abandoned train graveyard, all rust and ghosts. The flamingos on high-altitude lagoons. The Eduardo Avaroa National Park at the southern edge, where the ground turns colours that seem genuinely impossible.
Maz got his shots. Ngaio got better ones. Saskia just sat in the jeep window with her head out, grinning like a kid. Delphine kept trying to find edible plants. Tomás told us about lithium mining and climate change, which was a bit of a downer but necessary.
And me? I lost one flip-flop to the salt (naturally) and found it three hours later, perfectly preserved, sitting right where I'd left it. Seemed appropriate.
Coming Home
Bolivia doesn't make you feel small in a bad way. It's not the guilt-trip tourism of a lot of places. It's honest. The salt flats are actually that surreal. The cooking really is that good. The bike ride down Death Road actually is that intense. The people—Marcela, Miguel, our guides, the locals we met in markets—are genuinely interested in whether you're paying attention.
We flew out of La Paz with our heads full of sky, our bodies aching in that good way, and a group chat that's still going off.
Turns out you actually do better adventures when you've got mates to crash into things with.
