Bolivia: the Salar de Uyuni, La Paz and Lake Titicaca

I arrived in La Paz at night, and the first thing that struck me wasn't the city — it was my own breath. Short, shallow, a step behind me on the stairs out of the airport at El Alto, more than 4,000 metres up. They tell you about the altitude before you go; nobody quite tells you how it feels to climb four steps and have to stop, hands on your knees, while a grandmother carrying twice your luggage walks past without blinking. This is the story of three weeks on the roof of South America: the giant mirror of the Salar de Uyuni, La Paz hanging in its bowl of mountains, and the impossibly blue water of Lake Titicaca. A trip where I was almost always slightly dizzy, often near a hot bowl of soup, and where my phone signal came and went like the clouds.

La Paz, the city that pours down a mountain

La Paz is the highest seat of government in the world — around 3,600 metres — and it doesn't sprawl outward, it spills downward, neighbourhoods cascading from the rim of El Alto into the valley below. The genius answer to that vertical chaos is Mi Teleférico, the cable-car network that locals use as a metro: for a handful of bolivianos you glide silently over rooftops, laundry lines and football pitches, the whole brick-coloured city tilting beneath your feet. Down in the old town I wandered the Mercado de las Brujas, the witches' market, where stalls sell dried herbs, amulets and offerings tied to Aymara belief — I looked and listened, but never treated it as a curiosity to giggle at, because it's living culture, not a sideshow. The same went for the coca leaf, sold openly everywhere and chewed or brewed as tea against the altitude: a traditional Andean plant with deep cultural and medicinal roots, and conflating it with cocaine would be both wrong and disrespectful. I drank the tea. It helped, a little. Mostly I just went slowly.

« The Andes don't announce themselves. They simply sit on your chest and wait. »

In La Paz the eSIM did its job. I had data the moment I needed it — to book a Salar tour, to compare overnight buses, to message the family that I'd landed in one piece. Bolivia is outside the EU, so roam-like-at-home doesn't apply, and I'd installed a regional plan before flying. In the city, in Sucre, in Uyuni town, the connection held up fine. It was once I left the towns that things got interesting.

The Salar de Uyuni, where the sky lies down

From Uyuni town — past the eerie train cemetery, where rusting locomotives sit half-buried in the wind — you drive out onto the largest salt flat on the planet, around 10,000 square kilometres of blinding white. In the dry season it's a cracked mosaic of salt hexagons running flat to the curve of the earth, and you can stand at Isla Incahuasi among giant cacti that have somehow made a life out there. But the thing everyone chases is the mirror, and that only happens in the rainy season, roughly December to April, when a thin film of water turns the whole flat into a sheet of liquid sky. I caught the edge of it. For about an hour the horizon simply dissolved, clouds underfoot, no up or down, just me standing inside the weather.

Out on the Salar my phone became a camera and nothing more. The signal vanished completely — no bars, no maps, no messages — and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend otherwise. There is no eSIM on earth that conjures a network where no towers reach, and the altiplano and the salt flat are full of those white zones. The right move is to sort everything in town first: download your offline maps, send your messages, tell someone your route. Then let the disconnection be part of it. Out there, with no notifications, the silence is the point.

Potosí, Sucre, and the weight of what's underground

Further south I stopped in Potosí, and the mood changes. Above the city looms Cerro Rico, the "rich mountain" whose silver bankrolled the Spanish empire — a UNESCO site, and a place that asks for seriousness, not spectacle. Under colonial rule, vast numbers of Indigenous and enslaved people were forced to labour and die in those shafts through the mita system, and miners still work the mountain today in genuinely dangerous conditions. "Mine tourism" exists, and I won't pretend it's simple: there's a real ethical question about turning others' hardship into a half-day excursion, so I'd urge anyone to think hard, choose carefully if they go at all, and never treat it as a thrill. History this heavy deserves to be carried with care. Sucre, the constitutional capital, was a gentler landing afterwards — a white-walled UNESCO city of colonial churches and courtyards, sitting lower and warmer, where for the first time in days I could breathe like a normal person. I never made it to Tiwanaku, the great pre-Hispanic site near La Paz, or the cycle down the North Yungas "Death Road" — both are on the list for a return I'm already quietly planning.

Lake Titicaca and the island of the sun

I ended at Titicaca, often cited as the highest navigable lake in the world — a claim worth taking with a pinch of altiplano salt, depending on how you define it, but the water is real enough and impossibly blue. From the little town of Copacabana I took a boat to Isla del Sol, the Island of the Sun, sacred in Andean tradition as a birthplace of the Inca world. There are no cars there, only stone paths and terraces and the lake stretching out on every side. The connection around the lake was patchy — fine in Copacabana, thin once I was out on the island — and again, that felt right. Some places shouldn't be answered by a screen.

What I take away

Bolivia gave me the strangest, most generous fortnight of breathlessness I've ever known. I take away the hush of the Salar with the sky beneath my boots, the cable cars sliding over La Paz at dusk, the grave silence of Cerro Rico, and a lake so high and so blue it feels invented. I take away a respect for the people who live and breathe at altitudes that left me wheezing on the stairs. And I take away a small, useful truth: get connected where you can, then have the grace to let the rest of it go offline.

— Romain, still a little out of breath, eyes still full.