This week’s travel dream: Bolivia’s otherworldly landscape

A journey across Bolivia’s Andean Plateau makes for a “downright psychedelic” experience, said Margo Pfeiff in the Los Angeles Times. One of the most “wondrous if unforgiving” regions in all of South America, the lofty desert plateau, also known as Altiplano, had long been a dream destination of mine. Because I’d heard horror stories about do-it-yourselfers suffering altitude sickness, dehydration, and vehicle breakdowns in the middle of nowhere, I chose the “cushier, safer” option of using an international outfitter, one that supplied accommodations, vehicles, guides, and even oxygen equipment.

Our group met up with a guide in a 16th-century silver-mining town before driving three hours to Salar de Uyuni—the largest salt flat in the world. We stayed on the flat’s edge in a tiny village where the stone walls and thatched roof of our 300-year-old cottage weren’t enough to block out the thunderous sound of llamas stampeding through the street the next morning. That day, we hiked up Tunupa, a volcano famous for its collection of mummies that have been preserved in place by the dry air since the last eruption 1,800 years ago. Afterward, we drove to the middle of the salt flat just before sunset, broke out some champagne, and “watched low pink rays glitter across the polygon-patterned crystallized plain.”

“As the air got thinner, things got even weirder.” One day out in the desert, mini-tornadoes swept by at a distance as we hiked past “wind-sculpted stone hoodoos.” We came across huge green blobs that turned out to be a plant related to parsley that can live more than 3,000 years. “When I hiked through a forest of towering cactus one day and saw bunnies with long fluffy tails hopping about, I began to wonder whether I had fallen down a rabbit hole.” And we hadn’t yet even seen the flocks of flamingos that gather in the neon-orange waters of Laguna Colorada. Six hundred miles later, we reached the Chilean border, where the road back to civilization dropped us 7,000 feet in about half an hour. It was if we’d left the moon; “my lungs were drunk on oxygen.”

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Chile-based Explora (explora.com) offers multiday trips through Bolivia’s Altiplano, starting at $5,080 for two.