The jeep arrived at the edge of a perfectly white desert after four days of traversing endless barren plains perched 14,000 feet above the sea. We witnessed desolate rock formations resembling Giorgio de Chirico landscapes plucked from the canvas and planted on Mars, along with pink flamingos skirting the shores of crimson lagunas. Within a few moments, the sun had ascended and we were drifting across a sheet of reflective salt that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction, interrupted eventually by distant volcanoes and snow-capped mountains. Six travelers, a driver, a cook, and a Toyota jeep—once red, now caked in dirt—were the only exceptions to the vast whiteness.

The Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat; the adjacent national parks and protected areas stretch from Bolivia’s southern border with Argentina to its western border with Chile. Vertiginous landscapes abound in Bolivia, but few are as otherworldly as those found in the area around the Salar, one of the most visited places in Bolivia. Despite its popularity, Salar maintains the sense of complete solitude. Jeeps occasionally cross paths, lodgings are shared, but for the most part there are no intrusions or distractions, besides the roaming alpaca. The overall effect lies somewhere between a National Geographic film and a science fiction novel, at once awe-inspiring and alienating.

For the price of a few nights in a Rio de Janeiro hotel, travelers can hire a driver and a cook to guide them through the Salar for four days. The trip is as exhausting as it is exhilarating: roads are rare, the air is so thin it feels almost nonexistent, accommodations are minimal, the nights are freezing, and the altitude is taxing. Chewing on coca leaves to combat altitude sickness goes a long way, but taking a few steps without gasping seems like less of a triumph when you encounter sixty-year-old women and eight-year-old boys playing vigorous games of soccer on dirt fields at the top of the world.

Bolivia is rich with the marvels of nature and history, from the Salar to the distinctive collection of colonial-era Jesuit mission buildings around San José de Chiquitos, and the Incan ruins nestled in the Yungas mountain range. However, due to Bolivia’s enduring poverty, centuries of colonial exploitation, rugged terrain, and perennial social and political instability, the country never experienced the sort of tourism boom enjoyed by neighboring Peru and Argentina. Amenities are scarce, and X-Men: The Final Battle seems to be stuck in the projector at my local movie theater, but the excitement of social transformation makes up for it. Past travesties and future possibilities are on the tips of all tongues, and after a couple drinks those tongues loosen up considerably.

COMING INTO HER OWN
If Buenos Aires is the essence of Latin American cosmopolitanism—a cut rate Paris or Rome—La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, is its bastard brother, the misbegotten and mistreated child of colonialism just now beginning to come into her own. Whereas Salar epitomizes Bolivia’s epic natural beauty and the preservation of indigenous cultural traditions, La Paz represents the other side of Latin America’s poorest country. Vendors grill anticucho (skewered cow’s heart) beneath stately colonial cathedrals, synaesthetic marketplaces sprawl beneath stolid glass and steel skyscrapers, and echoes of the country’s 189 changes in government since independence was achieved in 1825 can be heard in daily protest marches and rallies.

Bolivia’s indigenous groups comprise sixty percent of the country’s population—as they have migrated to the cities and adapted to urban life, they have become increasingly effective at organizing to defend their rights, demanding the government heed their grievances, shutting down the country with road blocks when necessary.

Every day, lunch brings the country grinding to a halt between the hours of twelve and three. The lull is an opportune time to soak up the sun, which shines without interruption from April through November. It is also an ideal time for protestors to take over the streets. Protests are constant, and La Paz’s Plaza Murillo, the seat of government, is more often than not the center of such action. Most are peaceful, but an uprising in 2003 involved clashes between the military and the police and eventually led to the expulsion of then-President Gonzalo “Goni” (as in gringo) Sanchez de Lozada from the country – it also left the Presidential palace riddled with bullets.

Now Bolivia has its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, who has been working to make reforms that will rectify the injustices of the last five centuries. Despite Western anxiety regarding the nationalization of Bolivia’s gas industry and the influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the democratic reforms made by Evo’s Movimiento a Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism) party have been applauded by much of the international community, even the reviled International Monetary Fund. While Evo may be prone to embarrassingly rancorous public remarks—recently, he has shouted, “Long live coca, die Yankees!” at a rally and accused US soldiers of infiltrating the country disguised as students and tourists—Americans are infinitely more welcome than their government, and few take Evo’s comments seriously.

This sense of social tension and political change is as much a part of Bolivia as the altiplano itself, and one of the reasons many foreigners decide to stay here, whether to volunteer, learn Spanish, make documentaries, or work at an NGO. After living in Buenos Aires for two months I sacrificed excellent wine, innumerable cinemas, delectable pastries, luxurious buses and the finest meat in the world for a position at an NGO in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s historic second-city in the center of the country.

COLONIAL RELICS, RARE FLORA AND AK-47S
Cochabamba, Bolivia’s historical second city, is situated strategically on the only major road connecting La Paz to Santa Cruz. Apart from El Alto, a sprawling makeshift suburb of La Paz that transforms into an endless collection of stalls and booths every Sunday, Cochabamba is the country’s market center. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, La Cancha, a labyrinthine open-air market, stretches for miles. Racks of bootleg American DVDs compete for space with freeze-dried potatoes, ambiguous slabs of meat, scraps of metal and shoes imported from China, all under the watchful eye of the world’s tallest Jesus.

North of Cochabamba, the dusty plains dramatically drop off into the jungle of Chapare, the center of Bolivia’s coca trade and the US’s contentious efforts to eradicate cocaine production. Somewhere between a war zone and a tropical paradise, rare flora and wildlife abut checkpoints manned by soldiers with AK-47 rifles. Further into the jungle, fishing villages supplant artillery, and canoes will shuttle adventurous travelers up the Amazon and into Brazil.

To the southwest of Cochabamba is Sucre, undoubtedly Bolivia’s most beautiful city, with its array of pristine white convents, churches, and other leftovers from the colonial period. Franciscan monks and Guaraní émigrés mingle on the streets where Simón Bolívar declared independence in 1825. For the next six months to a year, Sucre will be the home of a constituent assembly that will rewrite the country’s constitution in order to, in the words of Evo, “re-found Bolivia in order to end the colonial state.” For a pittance, travelers can watch the day’s drama unfold from a table on Plaza de la Libertad, sipping chuflays (Bolivia’s signature drink, a local grape alcohol called Casa Real with ginger ale and lemon) until the sun sets over the city’s carved white facades.

When Sucre shuts down on Sundays, the neighboring weaving village of Tarabuco beckons with its weekly market saturated with immaculate local tapestries. Che’s footsteps can be followed from Quebrada del Yuro to La Higuera, where he took his last breath.

But Bolivia isn’t all colonial relics and social uprisings. Any ceviche dinner on La Paz’s Prado is just as likely to be interrupted by one of the country’s innumerable festivals and celebrations as a protest march. In late June, Plaza San Pedro hosted a week’s worth of parties to celebrate San Juan. Marching bands accompanied twirling Aymara women and devilishly costumed men, combining traditional dances and Catholic iconography. Night fell, and Andean pop and folk bands took over the plaza while matte and Casa Real were passed out to the dancing crowd. A happily drunk reveler took a fresh condor feather that had been turned into an earring and pushed it through my friend’s ear, then proceeded to drag her onto the dance floor. Around midnight, a barrage of fireworks launched from the plaza mingled with an equally impressive display fired from within the walls of the prison that marks the plaza’s southern border, to wild cheering on both sides. Incarcerated or not, no one in Bolivia is prevented from having a good time.