Chapter 14: Ten Days on the Altiplano
From the sacred waters of Lake Titicaca to the red stone canyons of Tupiza, Bolivia delivered a short but unforgettable stage—ten days at altitude, stitched together by desert light, ancestral memory, and quiet resilience.
My first full day in Bolivia began with a quiet rollout from Copacabana, tracing the shoreline of Lake Titicaca—the sacred lake of the Andes. Revered by the Inca and Tiwanaku as the birthplace of the sun, this massive body of water still hums with ancestral memory. But reverence came not only from myth; it came from the view itself. Route 2 offered a spectacle no photograph could match: cobalt sky above, deep blue water below, each vying for supremacy in a contest of purest grandeur. Between them lay a rugged, rocky coastline of ancient sedimentary stone, carved by time and lined with occasional villages, few and far between, quiet in their persistence. Low-lying vegetation clung to the slopes—stubborn, sunburnt flora that found a way to endure in this dry, high-altitude land not quite desert, not quite oasis.
The effect was staggering. The aches and burdens of the previous days dissolved in the purity of it all. My legs moved almost without input. There was nothing to do but worship—if not literally, then in posture and presence. I was a speck in a holy place, moving quietly through it, often smiling, and grateful just to be.
At the Strait of Tiquina, where modest villages on opposite shores might otherwise dissolve into obscurity were it not for the constant churn of boats and barges, I joined a car, a bus, and the barge operator in crossing the narrow waterway. Travelers approached whichever wooden platform was next in line—there were many coming and going. The operator pushed the heavy, loaded barge from shore with a long pole, then climbed aboard and started a small, sputtering outboard engine, calmly guiding us between San Pedro and San Pablo de Tiquina.
From the deck—an assemblage of cracked and patched wooden planks that somehow held together—I filmed Andean gulls (Chroicocephalus serranus) and Andean coots (Fulica ardesiaca) as they swam nearby, unbothered by the presence of machines and people. They foraged within proximity to humankind’s routines, adapting as so many species do—gracefully, if out of necessity.
The modern bus stood in stark contrast to the dilapidated barge—a shocking juxtaposition between sleek efficiency and patchwork survival, underscoring how differently the rest of the world operates. Midway across the strait, my GPS read 12,669 feet—nearly 3,900 meters—a reminder of just how high we floated above sea level, even while drifting quietly across the sacred waters of Lake Titicaca. On the far shore, I merged with a line of vehicles and resumed my ride, soon climbing again into a vast, open expanse of highland, dotted with distant villages and glimmers of snow-capped peaks to the east.
That night I stayed in Batallas, a medium-sized town with many empty shops and plazas—quiet but unremarkable—where I took shelter for a single night before continuing. The next day brought a return to the chaos of density. I rode through El Alto, Bolivia’s high-altitude metropolis perched above La Paz, stopping briefly for a new SIM card. The card was immediately problematic, fixed by the young couple who sold it to me, and then failed again. I did not descend into La Paz itself. Instead, I veered away, re-entering quieter lands on the road to Patacamaya. By now, the Altiplano—a vast table of Earth suspended above 12,000 feet and flanked by the jagged Bolivian Andes—stretched in every direction. Its light was sharp, its wind relentless but not always cruel. Towns appeared like punctuation marks—moments to rest, to eat, to reflect.
From Patacamaya to Oruro, and on again to Machacamarca, the route held steady at altitude. As many travelers have eloquently observed, Bolivia is not simply high—it is a nation suspended in the sky. Nearly every mile unfolds above 12,000 feet, a ceiling turned into floor. Within this elevated world, the scale of the landscape grew increasingly abstract—vast, elemental, and dreamlike, as if painted on a canvas where time slowed and distances blurred into myth.
In the oasis of Sevaruyo—a town whose former significance as a railway hub has long since diminished—the echoes of history remain. The seemingly abandoned train station, the crisscrossing rails overtaken by dust and weeds, and the skeletal outbuildings now silent in the sun speak of a busier time, when locomotives threaded through Bolivia's highlands carrying minerals, passengers, and possibility. Today, those tracks cross empty terrain without a whisper of steel or smoke, monuments to an era gone still.
Into this quiet history I arrived, weary and searching. After several failed attempts to locate lodging, local kindness guided me to a nearly hidden hospedaje. Maria, the proprietor, leaned out from a second-floor window to greet me, her smile immediate and warm. As she led me to my room, her youngest daughter darted between us, her laughter adding life to the quiet of the town and echoing the spirit of the welcome I’d just received.
Once I'd rinsed off with a pour-over bath—taken from a 55-gallon steel drum collecting roof runoff and stored in a concrete-block stall that doubled as the family’s shared bathroom—I wandered into town looking for food. I asked a stranger on the street if there was anywhere I could eat in town. He shouted to a nearby group of friends, and within moments I was being walked over and welcomed into a potluck already underway: a warm, loosely organized gathering of locals from Sevaruyo and neighboring towns. Inside, I found strangers who quickly became friends. Their curiosity was boundless, their generosity effortless. Plate after plate was delivered to me with chicken and salads, with Coca-Cola. The women serving from large pots smiled knowingly, observing the unlikely visitor in their midst. Somehow, without intent, I had once again ridden into the unknown and landed among kin.
The morning after the potluck, I resumed riding—reentering the surreal quiet of Bolivia’s desert interior. Crossing more dreamlike terrain, the road offered both distance and reflection.
By day’s end I arrived in Uyuni—a town famous among travelers and perhaps locals alike. I approached from the north, having skirted the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, Earth’s largest salt flat, for many privileged miles. I have a deep fondness for dry salt lake beds, and my curiosity built steadily as I neared the vast white basin. Eventually I settled in alongside it, riding quietly as fatigue faded beneath the spell of the landscape. I stared for long minutes, mesmerized by the lake’s scale, its pure white expanse, and the way mirages shimmered and reformed like shifting illusions. I wondered if a universe was hidden in this wondrous space—so stark, so quiet, so impossible to grasp in full. The town was large for the region, dusty, and flat—surrounded by the remnants of a prehistoric lake that long ago evaporated into mineral plain. Standing at the edge of the Salar, I felt as though I were at the bottom of the sky—where salt met silence and the wind made no sound.
From Uyuni, I began one of the most visually striking legs of the entire tour. Between there and Atocha, the desert expanded into cinematic splendor—gorgeous red earth, endless ridgelines, and curious alpacas roaming free. I followed a thread of road that felt impossibly placed, twisting through shadow and chasing sun. At times, the rivers were like floodplains, wide and expansive. When these braided channels aligned with hills striped in colors—sandstones and other sedimentary layers formed through epochs, some containing the fossilized remains of dinosaurs—the landscape seemed conjured by design, shaped by epochs older than myth and more silent than memory.
By the time I reached Tupiza, I had dropped nearly 3,000 feet into a narrow canyon—a kind of Wild West outpost famous for its connection to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The terrain built slowly toward a crescendo of red splendor that spilled in all directions from the famous town, but so did the demands on my body. Just as I had begun to settle into a rhythm through Bolivia's otherworldly elevations, the toll caught up with me. In Tupiza, I was hit with another round of illness. It marked the fourth significant bout of GI trouble on the tour, reminding me that the body—no matter how determined—has limits. I extended my stay to two nights and did my best to recover.
The final stretch across Bolivia played like a coda. I left Tupiza early, to avoid traffic exiting the busy town and some of the day’s heat, and rode all the way to La Quiaca, Argentina in a single day—crossing the border and resting there before continuing east and southeast the next morning. In the hours that I closed the gap to Argentina, the route continued, like the day before, through majestic desert ridges and narrow river canyons, with small towns offering brief pause. I was tired, ready to cross into Argentina, but also continually mesmerized by yet another miraculous offering of the land. From sacred waters to red stone canyons, Bolivia had marked me—as if the land itself had whispered, you were here and now you will remember for all of your subsequent days. Ten days at elevation that most humans will never experience or could fathom, a grand, elevated stage of culture and dry, epic landscapes.
I found a small restaurant in the Bolivian border town, where I had a modest meal—still fragile from the latest GI bug. It was one last moment of quiet nourishment before stepping into the formal ritual of crossing. Not far away, I arrived to the border and exchanged Bolivian cash for a literal stack, as if I was part of a scripted film, of Argentine bills—reflecting not my imminent Hollywood fame but instead the country's ongoing inflation crisis. I did my best to be discreet as I tucked thousands of pesos into my pannier.
Though uneventful, the crossing stayed with me. I rolled over the bridge—fenced in above a desert river—pausing to breathe in a space where personal agency momentarily gave way to the presence of uniformed authority on either side. It was a small surrender, but not an empty one. I felt it: the quiet threshold between known and unknown, a hinge swinging open into the final country of the tour. A few seconds of stillness, a single deep breath, and then I was in Argentina.
The effect was staggering. The aches and burdens of the previous days dissolved in the purity of it all. My legs moved almost without input. There was nothing to do but worship—if not literally, then in posture and presence. I was a speck in a holy place, moving quietly through it, often smiling, and grateful just to be.
At the Strait of Tiquina, where modest villages on opposite shores might otherwise dissolve into obscurity were it not for the constant churn of boats and barges, I joined a car, a bus, and the barge operator in crossing the narrow waterway. Travelers approached whichever wooden platform was next in line—there were many coming and going. The operator pushed the heavy, loaded barge from shore with a long pole, then climbed aboard and started a small, sputtering outboard engine, calmly guiding us between San Pedro and San Pablo de Tiquina.
From the deck—an assemblage of cracked and patched wooden planks that somehow held together—I filmed Andean gulls (Chroicocephalus serranus) and Andean coots (Fulica ardesiaca) as they swam nearby, unbothered by the presence of machines and people. They foraged within proximity to humankind’s routines, adapting as so many species do—gracefully, if out of necessity.
The modern bus stood in stark contrast to the dilapidated barge—a shocking juxtaposition between sleek efficiency and patchwork survival, underscoring how differently the rest of the world operates. Midway across the strait, my GPS read 12,669 feet—nearly 3,900 meters—a reminder of just how high we floated above sea level, even while drifting quietly across the sacred waters of Lake Titicaca. On the far shore, I merged with a line of vehicles and resumed my ride, soon climbing again into a vast, open expanse of highland, dotted with distant villages and glimmers of snow-capped peaks to the east.
That night I stayed in Batallas, a medium-sized town with many empty shops and plazas—quiet but unremarkable—where I took shelter for a single night before continuing. The next day brought a return to the chaos of density. I rode through El Alto, Bolivia’s high-altitude metropolis perched above La Paz, stopping briefly for a new SIM card. The card was immediately problematic, fixed by the young couple who sold it to me, and then failed again. I did not descend into La Paz itself. Instead, I veered away, re-entering quieter lands on the road to Patacamaya. By now, the Altiplano—a vast table of Earth suspended above 12,000 feet and flanked by the jagged Bolivian Andes—stretched in every direction. Its light was sharp, its wind relentless but not always cruel. Towns appeared like punctuation marks—moments to rest, to eat, to reflect.
From Patacamaya to Oruro, and on again to Machacamarca, the route held steady at altitude. As many travelers have eloquently observed, Bolivia is not simply high—it is a nation suspended in the sky. Nearly every mile unfolds above 12,000 feet, a ceiling turned into floor. Within this elevated world, the scale of the landscape grew increasingly abstract—vast, elemental, and dreamlike, as if painted on a canvas where time slowed and distances blurred into myth.
In the oasis of Sevaruyo—a town whose former significance as a railway hub has long since diminished—the echoes of history remain. The seemingly abandoned train station, the crisscrossing rails overtaken by dust and weeds, and the skeletal outbuildings now silent in the sun speak of a busier time, when locomotives threaded through Bolivia's highlands carrying minerals, passengers, and possibility. Today, those tracks cross empty terrain without a whisper of steel or smoke, monuments to an era gone still.
Into this quiet history I arrived, weary and searching. After several failed attempts to locate lodging, local kindness guided me to a nearly hidden hospedaje. Maria, the proprietor, leaned out from a second-floor window to greet me, her smile immediate and warm. As she led me to my room, her youngest daughter darted between us, her laughter adding life to the quiet of the town and echoing the spirit of the welcome I’d just received.
Once I'd rinsed off with a pour-over bath—taken from a 55-gallon steel drum collecting roof runoff and stored in a concrete-block stall that doubled as the family’s shared bathroom—I wandered into town looking for food. I asked a stranger on the street if there was anywhere I could eat in town. He shouted to a nearby group of friends, and within moments I was being walked over and welcomed into a potluck already underway: a warm, loosely organized gathering of locals from Sevaruyo and neighboring towns. Inside, I found strangers who quickly became friends. Their curiosity was boundless, their generosity effortless. Plate after plate was delivered to me with chicken and salads, with Coca-Cola. The women serving from large pots smiled knowingly, observing the unlikely visitor in their midst. Somehow, without intent, I had once again ridden into the unknown and landed among kin.
The morning after the potluck, I resumed riding—reentering the surreal quiet of Bolivia’s desert interior. Crossing more dreamlike terrain, the road offered both distance and reflection.
By day’s end I arrived in Uyuni—a town famous among travelers and perhaps locals alike. I approached from the north, having skirted the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, Earth’s largest salt flat, for many privileged miles. I have a deep fondness for dry salt lake beds, and my curiosity built steadily as I neared the vast white basin. Eventually I settled in alongside it, riding quietly as fatigue faded beneath the spell of the landscape. I stared for long minutes, mesmerized by the lake’s scale, its pure white expanse, and the way mirages shimmered and reformed like shifting illusions. I wondered if a universe was hidden in this wondrous space—so stark, so quiet, so impossible to grasp in full. The town was large for the region, dusty, and flat—surrounded by the remnants of a prehistoric lake that long ago evaporated into mineral plain. Standing at the edge of the Salar, I felt as though I were at the bottom of the sky—where salt met silence and the wind made no sound.
From Uyuni, I began one of the most visually striking legs of the entire tour. Between there and Atocha, the desert expanded into cinematic splendor—gorgeous red earth, endless ridgelines, and curious alpacas roaming free. I followed a thread of road that felt impossibly placed, twisting through shadow and chasing sun. At times, the rivers were like floodplains, wide and expansive. When these braided channels aligned with hills striped in colors—sandstones and other sedimentary layers formed through epochs, some containing the fossilized remains of dinosaurs—the landscape seemed conjured by design, shaped by epochs older than myth and more silent than memory.
By the time I reached Tupiza, I had dropped nearly 3,000 feet into a narrow canyon—a kind of Wild West outpost famous for its connection to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The terrain built slowly toward a crescendo of red splendor that spilled in all directions from the famous town, but so did the demands on my body. Just as I had begun to settle into a rhythm through Bolivia's otherworldly elevations, the toll caught up with me. In Tupiza, I was hit with another round of illness. It marked the fourth significant bout of GI trouble on the tour, reminding me that the body—no matter how determined—has limits. I extended my stay to two nights and did my best to recover.
The final stretch across Bolivia played like a coda. I left Tupiza early, to avoid traffic exiting the busy town and some of the day’s heat, and rode all the way to La Quiaca, Argentina in a single day—crossing the border and resting there before continuing east and southeast the next morning. In the hours that I closed the gap to Argentina, the route continued, like the day before, through majestic desert ridges and narrow river canyons, with small towns offering brief pause. I was tired, ready to cross into Argentina, but also continually mesmerized by yet another miraculous offering of the land. From sacred waters to red stone canyons, Bolivia had marked me—as if the land itself had whispered, you were here and now you will remember for all of your subsequent days. Ten days at elevation that most humans will never experience or could fathom, a grand, elevated stage of culture and dry, epic landscapes.
I found a small restaurant in the Bolivian border town, where I had a modest meal—still fragile from the latest GI bug. It was one last moment of quiet nourishment before stepping into the formal ritual of crossing. Not far away, I arrived to the border and exchanged Bolivian cash for a literal stack, as if I was part of a scripted film, of Argentine bills—reflecting not my imminent Hollywood fame but instead the country's ongoing inflation crisis. I did my best to be discreet as I tucked thousands of pesos into my pannier.
Though uneventful, the crossing stayed with me. I rolled over the bridge—fenced in above a desert river—pausing to breathe in a space where personal agency momentarily gave way to the presence of uniformed authority on either side. It was a small surrender, but not an empty one. I felt it: the quiet threshold between known and unknown, a hinge swinging open into the final country of the tour. A few seconds of stillness, a single deep breath, and then I was in Argentina.