Come into La Paz on one of its cable cars. The city sits in a deep canyon, with the satellite city of El Alto spread out on the plateau above, and the cable cars connecting them form one of the largest urban networks of their kind in the world. Leave El Alto and the view tips over the rim. La Paz opens up all at once, roofs and streets spilling down the canyon walls toward the valley floor. Beyond the far rim, the snow peaks of the Cordillera Real mountains rise white against the sky. Illimani, the highest of them, looms over the whole city. You’re at 4,100 meters when you step on, 3,650 when you step off, and in the ten minutes between the two altitudes you start to understand that everything about this country is going to feel different from wherever you came from.
Almost every trip to the Bolivian Altiplano starts this way, and the travelers who fly in, spend three days on the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in the south, and fly out again are missing most of what makes the country worth the flight. The Altiplano is a high plateau about a thousand kilometers long, running from Lake Titicaca in the north to the Argentine border in the south, at an average elevation above 3,500 meters. It’s one of the largest high plateaus on the planet, second only to the Tibetan Plateau, and what rewards a longer trip is that its three regions share almost nothing beyond the altitude. The north is a water world of reed-lined bays and sacred islands. The center is volcanic and almost empty, home mostly to wild vicuñas. The south is the part everyone has seen in photographs. The salt flat is the least interesting piece of it.
The Bolivian Altiplano at a Glance
A thousand kilometers of high plateau running from Lake Titicaca in the north to the Argentine border in the south.
Average elevation above 3,500 meters, rising to 6,542 meters at Nevado Sajama, the tallest peak in Bolivia.
Three distinct regions: Lake Titicaca and La Paz in the north, Sajama National Park in the center, Uyuni and the Eduardo Avaroa reserve in the south.
10 to 14 days recommended for a proper trip through all three regions.
Dry season (May to October) is best for the full plateau; February is best for the Uyuni mirror effect.
The Northern Altiplano
La Paz will own your first day in Bolivia whether you want it to or not. The altitude (3,650 meters in the city center, higher up on the canyon rim) rearranges everything. You walk slower. You sleep badly. The light is sharper than you’re used to because there’s less atmosphere between you and the sun. Coca tea at breakfast helps. So does doing nothing much for an afternoon.
Three or four hours west by road, Lake Titicaca spreads across the border with Peru. It’s the largest lake in South America by volume and the highest commercially navigable body of water in the world, which sounds like a trivia answer until you see it. More inland sea than lake. The thin air does something to the light on the water that’s hard to describe and impossible to photograph well. Copacabana, the main Bolivian town on the lakeshore, is busy without being touristy. Its basilica is home to the Virgin of Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia, and draws pilgrims from across the country. Most days, cars line up in the forecourt waiting to be blessed with holy water and flower petals by the priests. Fishermen push small boats out onto the lake before first light. You eat trout for lunch at a restaurant on the main street, pulled from the water that morning, fried whole with lime and served with potatoes and rice.
From Copacabana, boats run out to Isla del Sol, the island the Inca believed was the birthplace of their civilization. There are no cars and no paved roads. You walk. Stone terraces built centuries before the Spanish arrived still hold soil on the slopes, and the families living on the island still farm those terraces. You can hike the length of Isla del Sol in a long day, stopping at Inca ruins along the way, and stay the night in a simple guesthouse run by an island family. They’re Aymara, one of the indigenous peoples of the high Andes, and they speak the Aymara language. Their ancestors have lived on this island for more than a thousand years.
The northern Altiplano is also where Aymara culture stops being an abstraction and becomes a Saturday morning. The weekly markets in Copacabana and the smaller towns around the lake are working markets, not tourist markets. Aymara women called cholitas sit behind mounds of potatoes in every color, dried fish in baskets, coca leaves by the kilo, and herbs wrapped in newsprint, all of them wearing the bowler hats that became their signature look in the 1920s after British railway workers brought the style to Bolivia. The pace is slow. Nobody’s selling to you. You can wander for an afternoon without being hassled once.
The Central Altiplano: Sajama
Almost nobody who travels to Bolivia visits Sajama National Park, which is part of what makes it worth the trouble. The park is in the central Altiplano, about four hours southwest of La Paz by road, on the border with Chile. Its centerpiece is Nevado Sajama, 6,542 meters high, the tallest peak in Bolivia. You see it long before you reach it. The road runs flat and brown for an hour after you turn off the main highway to Chile, and then Sajama rises out of the plain, a clean volcanic cone so much larger than its surroundings that the scale takes a while to sort itself out.
The park isn’t developed. There’s no main lodge, no real visitor center, no line of tour buses at the gate. A handful of small communities inside the park boundary offer simple rooms. The road in is rough. The weather changes without warning. What you get in exchange is a landscape with almost no other travelers in it.
Sajama is vicuña country. Vicuñas are the wild ancestors of the alpaca, smaller and leaner, and their fleece is the finest natural fiber on the planet. They only live at high elevations, so the whole Altiplano is technically their range, but Sajama holds some of the largest herds in Bolivia. You see them in groups of twenty or thirty grazing on the tough bunchgrass of the plain, the young ones sticking close to the adults. Stop the car and they freeze and watch you. Step out and they run. They move like deer, fast and low over the grass. Andean condors ride the thermals off the volcanic slopes above them.
The park also contains the highest-altitude forest on earth. Groves of queñua, a gnarled and twisted Andean tree in the genus Polylepis, grow in dense stands on the lower slopes of Sajama itself. They survive at elevations where no other tree can, and the pockets of forest they form shelter animal and plant species found nowhere else. Hot springs at the base of the volcano are another reason to come. You soak in rough stone pools at 4,200 meters with the summit filling the sky above you and nobody else within sight.
