ON BOLIVIA & CHILE
Every day in Bolivia was a true adventure, chalked full of sublime experiences and dramatic views.
Before embarking on the Radical Sabbatical, Quintin and I created a list of “must visit” countries and from the jump, Bolivia was on it. Quintin simply googled “Salar de Uyuni during the wet season” and the results were so compelling, it prompted him to create his first ever bucket list.
As for me, Bolivia had been on my bucket list for eons. Of course the ethereal expanse of Salar de Uyuni beckoned, but more importantly, every traveler I’d ever connected with and trust loves Bolivia. They all rank it in their top 3 countries and, reflecting back on our time in Bolivia, I’m giving it the honor as well.
Every day had an air of excitement. A bike ride that starts on a snowy plateau but ends in the rainforest?! WHAT but also OK?!?! Female wrestlers dressed in traditional Incan garb absolutely pummeling each other in a high school gym?! I’ll be there… A four day jeep tour where every day upstages the previous day in which I thought I had seen the most remarkable site on planet earth?! Let me catch my breath! Bolivia, please! (impossible due to my elation but also the elevation – we didn’t go under 12,600 feet for 3 weeks)
La Paz:
I couldn't possibly pick a single highlight in La Paz, because every day was a noteworthy contender. We arrived in La Paz at 6:00AM by bus, my first overnight ride. After 9 hours on a lay “flat” seat, we disembarked, cracked our backs, hopped in a cab and were delivered to our apartment. La Paz sits in a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by the towering peaks of the Andes, and the city features impossibly steep streets and winding roads. The city is built on varying elevations, and navigating its streets always involves steep inclines and declines. One unique feature of La Paz's skyline is the network of cable cars known as Mi Teleférico. Our apartment was on the 18th floor, and it was all (!) windows (!). I could have stood there looking out at the mountains, cable cars, and insane roads as the clouds moved in and out all day. But adventure beckoned….
Maybe you’ve heard of the Death Road Biking Experience. In the event you’ve never researched a trip to Bolivia, however, allow me to explain. The Death Road drops 11,000 feet in elevation in 39 miles and you bike it. It’s the best mountain bike ride you’ll ever go on because there isn’t a stitch of uphill. The scenery is also preposterous.
When we arrived to the start of the ride, we were at 15,000 feet above sea level and there was snow on the ground. I had my bathing suit in my backpack, and there was snow falling on my shoulder. Am I having an aneurysm, or did this man not text me tellig my to bring bring a swimsuit!? Dismayed, we were given our gear and our safety briefing and then we were off. The first part of the road is completely paved so I felt safe. We ride a few kilometers and then pull over for the guides to ensure everybody is feeling comfortable. I can’t move my frozen fingers on a ride that requires constant pressing on the brakes, but sure, adelante!!!!!!!!
Over the next 25 kilometers I didn't see Quintin once as he was OFF to the races. He assured me he was “staying safe” and “definitely not trying to compete” with anybody but the very next sentence out of his mouth was “and once, I was even in first place, right behind the guide!!!!” First place. On something dubbed The Death Road. Men are imbeciles, and Quintin did go torpedoing off his bike into a ditch not but 15 minutes later.
The whole ride was sensational with deep valleys, rugged cliffs, lush greenery, and cascading waterfalls that I actually rode my bike under. As we rode up to the finish line we were greeted by a hotel covered in greenery, with hundreds of colorful flowers draping the walkways, and avocados the size of my literal calves falling off the tree’s. The existence of snow nothing but a distant memory.
Copacabana:
Copacabana is the main town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, the 18th largest lake in the world. It’s so big it looks like the ocean. After arriving and settling into our hotel, we decided to go for a little walk to a viewpoint where you can admire the expanse of the lake and the surrounding mountains. I can’t tell you a single thing about the view because the “little walk” was straight uphill and unbeknownst to us before endeavoring on this “little walk” Copacabana sits at 13,000 feet above sea level. I was seeing stars.
We took a boat to Isla del Sol and did a hike there that was totally shriek worthy. Rolling green hills covered in wildflowers, old stone ruins scattered about, exhaustive views of the lake, and millions of farm animals running amuck. It ruled. The highlight of Copacabana, however, was how absolutely random our encounters there were. Allow me to elaborate…
There are literally dozens of restaurants lining the lake. Maybe even hundreds. For all intents and purposes, every single one of these restaurants has the same menu and the star of the menu is trout. Every restaurant has lake trout. Obviously, seeing as we are on the lake. We go to one of these said restaurants and I order trout. You all will not believe that I was served salmon. It might not SOUND weird to the untrained ear, but this is a lakeside (roadside) restaurant in Copacabana, Bolivia. The concept of importing food for a more robust menu does not exist. What they grow in the surrounding towns is what they serve, which is why every single restaurant has the same menu…TROUT AND QUINOA. I googled it and there are no salmon in Lake Titicaca. No menu had the word salmon on it. No other person I could see, or ever saw, had salmon. Where did this salmon come from, and how did it end up on my plate?
Over the course of our three days in Copacabana I used three public restrooms and each stall I visited had impassioned love letters to the members of BTS carved into the walls. This was not your standard “I <3 BTS, Jung Ho-seok gives me heart palpitations ” but rather EVERY wall, including the door and floor, were tagged with excessive declarations of love and ARMY symbolism. This wasn’t one girlie going crazy one time in one bathroom. THREE different stalls, in THREE different locations, including one stall on Isla del Sol…a totally separate island. So there I was, in the bathroom of the ferry terminal in Copacabana, Bolivia like “yes, Kim Tae-hyung, yo tambien te amo con mi ser enterno. <3 Please announce a comeback tour and hit Bolivia.”The fan base knows no bounds.
here is my PROOF hehehehe get it?
Finally, the hotel we stayed at housed two of the most busted llama’s you’ve ever seen or dreamed of seeing. Llama’s. I love them, they make me squeal with delight, and it’s an absolute pleasure to be in the presence of a llama. These llamas were so disgusting you could quite literally smell them when you walked out your front door in the morning. No other llama we saw, of which there were thousands, did we smell. Why were these two fairly domestic llamas so stinky and disheveled?!?! Copacabana, RANDOM.
Uyuni Salt Flats:
Last, but absolutely not least was the 4 day drive we did from San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia), one of the most indescribable and staggering stretches of land on planet earth. I could not possibly break it down to one highlight so here are the several HIGHLIGHTS…
On day one of the journey we made it to Laguna Colorada which is flat out mesmerizing. When I look back on the pictures we took I’m dismayed. While Quintin is a Nat Geo caliber photographer, there is no photo that could do justice to the convergence of vivid colors of the lagoon. The lagoon's name perfectly captures its most prominent feature: the vibrant red hue that dominates its waters. Have you ever seen red water?! I had not, so there I was again, gobsmacked by the scene unfolding in front of me.
Adding to the surreal vibe, are the flocks of flamingos that call Laguna Colorada home. These elegant birds, with their pink plumage, create a stunning contrast against the red waters as they gracefully glide over its surface. The entire scene is a testament to the raw beauty of Bolivia, where the interplay of color, light, and wildlife come together in a symphony of visual delight.
We were traveling with a Frenchman who quite literally had his breath taken away by the beauty. He was completely paralyzed by the view, and stunned into silence. A full 25 minutes after we left he finally spoke and was like “that left an indelible mark on my soul.” Same, mon frère, same.
On day two we visited a llama farm. I have no idea if this was an actual farm but it was a huge expanse of a grassy knoll, surrounded by beautiful red rocks, PACKED with llamas. Baby llamas, llamas with bows in their hair, llama’s frolicking, llamas running about, etc. The llamas would let you get SO close you could almost touch them. Whatever the Frenchman had experienced at Laguna Colorada is what I experienced here. I could not stop smiling and shrieking and DEMANDING that Quintin take one more photo, one more video of me with the cutest llama you’ve ever seen in your life. I was late to lunch, and held up our whole group, because it took me so long to walk through the llama field. Bliss.
So now that the Frenchman and I had our moment of paralysis, it was Quintins turn. During the rainy season, a thin layer of water covers the surface of the salt flats, transforming the flats into a giant mirror that perfectly reflects the sky above, creating a breathtaking illusion of infinity. Mind you, this only happens during the rainy season and ONLY if it’s rained within the past 24 hours. Blessed be to god, it had.
It’s 5:15AM, the sun is JUST starting to wake up, and we’ve already been in the jeep for half an hour. When we arrived to our destination on the salt flat and got out of the car, Quintin was paralyzed. I could tell he was genuinely shocked at the expanse of the flats, the pristine mirror effect, and the fact that nothing you could ever see online would prepare you for the grandeur of the moment. The sky was perfectly reflected onto the Salt Flat, all but making a Windexed mirror look like mud. As the sun rose, as the clouds rolled in and out overhead, and as the sky changed colors with the rising sun, so too did the Salt Flats. For at least 30 minutes everybody was eerily quiet, trying to wrap their heads around what we were seeing and trying to understand how we had gotten SO lucky. Then the sun rose and it was a frenzy of group shots and selfies to get the dopest pictures of all time.
Sensational.
Last but certainly not least, our journey ended at Incahuasi Island. I’ll ask you to put yourself in my shoes.
You’ve just had a month long bender of one “prettiest thing you’ve ever seen in your life” after another. You’re hoarse from shrieking and you have carpal tunnel from taking so many pictures. You’ve managed to see Salar de Uyuni on its most beautiful day ever. You’re windburned, sunburned, oxygen deprived and you’ve somehow gotten botox injections freezing your face into a permasmile. The only thing left before you head to a new continent is breakfast at an island with cactuses. I’m thinking the tour is over, we’re having a parking lot breakfast and then we’ll be off.
Well, it was a parking lot breakfast, but the parking lot is the Uyuni Salt Flat and the view is Incahuasi Island. In the midst of this starkly beautiful, barren terrain Incahuasi Island rises out of the Salt Flat like a green sentinel from the salt crust, adding a touch of surrealism to the scene.
One of the more captivating aspects of Incahuasi Island is the panoramic view it provides of the surrounding salt flat. From its elevated vantage point, you get an uninterrupted vista of the dazzling white expanse of the Salar de Uyuni stretching out as far as the eye can see; it literally feels like you’re looking out over the ocean. The vastness of the salt flat against the backdrop of distant mountains is unsettling, and you can’t exactly place what it is you’re looking at.
Adding to phantasmal scene, the island is home to thousands of giant cacti. These ancient cacti, with their gnarled and twisted trunks, stand tall against the stark landscape, their green columns providing a striking contrast to the blinding whiteness of the salt. The juxtaposition of the lush greenery of the cacti against the barren salt flat creates a scene straight out of a dream, a stark reminder of the resilience of life in even the most inhospitable environments. This place was both alien and enchanting.
In sum, all I can say is that Salar de Uyuni is marvelous. When the sky meets the horizon, the boundary between heaven and earth seems to blur, defying description, a true testament to the incomparable wonders that nature has to offer.
Before entering Bolivia, we also spent 3 days in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The three days don’t garner their own blog post, but the Atacama Desert is mind-boggling and absolutely deserves a shout out for the beauty, but also because it is here where we had one of my favorite dishes of the whole trip, Pastel de Choclo, which is basically if corn casserole and chicken pot pie had a baby. Goooooddddddnight.
We drove around for several days shrieking at the landscape. I can say with resolute confidence, there is nowhere on earth like the Atacama Desert; this is a place of unparalleled geographical wonder. Towering sand dunes rise and fall like waves frozen in time, their ochre hues shifting with the sun's passage. Amidst this stark desert beauty, unexpected oases (lagoons) punctuate the desert with their emerald hues contrasting against the earthy tones of the desert floor. Never has there been a place where quality sunglasses are as paramount.
When night falls, the Atacama Desert unveils its ultimate spectacle—the clearest skies on earth, where millions of stars twinkle against an inky canvas. Some say it’s the best place on earth to stargaze, and having evaluated their theory, I can confirm. I love peering up at a good, star filled sky but guided stargazing…dull. We participated in a guided stargazing situation with very fancy telescopes and an over enthusiastic NASA type as our guide and I can say with resolute confidence, it’s not an activity I’ll ever participate in again. Torturously dull.
