A dirty little secret about backpackers is that they don’t always gave the best reputation internationally. Notoriously cheap, they will often spend 15 minutes haggling over $2 with a taxi because they don’t want to be “ripped off.” They can create insular communities within towns that cater specifically to backpackers yet somehow manage to keep tourism money out of the town. It is not uncommon to travel to a place in Guatemala and stay in a hostel owned by a Dutch couple, eat at a restaurant owned by a Brit, drink at a US expats craft brewery, and then go on a tour run by an Australian company. Add in that half of backpackers are more interested in a cheap party than a unique cultural experience and it’s no wonder that in some places they are viewed as more akin to a plague than an economic boon.

In defense of backpackers, they are often the first travelers through the wall. Long before rumors of Prague’s amazing old square or the top to bottom beauty of Vietnam or the bargain that is Nicaragua reached the great vacationing hordes, backpackers were there. Wanna know if a place is safe to visit or where the next vacation hot spot is gonna be? See what’s popular on Hostelworld.

Bolivia is such a place, here are backpackers in abundance, without a single tourist in sight. I do not think I saw a single rolling suitcase in my entire time in country, but double backpacked wanderers abound. Bolivia, perhaps, is the next big thing. But then there is Uyuni, and the backpacker plague at its worst.

Uyuni is a paradox. Here is the gateway to the Salar de Uyuni, one of the single most arresting natural wonders I have ever seen. Here is a place where every single traveler of any length of time or type of visit is guaranteed to visit. Here is a place with more tour agencies per block than perhaps any other place I have ever seen. Yet here is a ghost town, that seems on verge of simply crumbling away at any minute. Here backpackers flock by the hundreds every week, and here they have nearly no imprint. They force a town to create an infrastructure for them, then nickle and dime those service providers. Many backpackers go out of their way to avoid spending a night in Uyuni at all.

We arrive early, very early. The sun has not risen and Uyuni feels like a mirror of our exhaustion. For the first time since Guatemala we are accosted as soon as we exit the bus, men and women offer tours and cafes and rides one after the other not hearing or ignoring our denials. We make haste for the taxi cue and as soon as we pass the edge of the buildings the cold is joined by a harsh wind. We scurry across the street and catch the sole available taxi to our hostel. The drive is only 15 minutes and there is nothing to see in the dark night, but it is evident this is not a town of wealth. At the hostel we accept an offer to check in early for a not insubstantial fee, tiredness winning out over frugality.

We sleep late and when we arise it is nearly time for lunch. We have only one item on the agenda for the day, book a tour of the Salar. We make our way to a pizza place, snapping photos of tour offices along the way. Those are among the only photos we take, as Uyuni is not a photogenic city. The wind blows all the time, carring cold and dust and reaching your skin no matter how many layers you wear. The city is gray and dull no matter how much the sun shines, every other building is abandoned. Parks and decorations try and bring color to the town, but their faded yellows and reds only highlight the sense of a town fading to dust. Statues of workers dedicated to unions and the power of labor combine with the concrete architecture to trick you into thinking you have been transported to some forgotten corner of the former Soviet Union. We reach the pizza place, located in what is clearly intended to be the backpacker hive, but it does nothing to ease the gloom. We are the only people in the restaurant, maybe in the whole sector, shopkeeps so used to doing nothing they look too surprised by our presence to attempt to sell us anything. In some dark irony, the food is really good.

Bolivia has not recovered from the pandemic. People still wear masks here, in far greater numbers than anywhere else we have visited, and far far more than in Oklahoma. Here we find our guide book to be the least useful, nearly half the recommended restaurants and hostels no longer in existence. Booking anything, a hostel, a bus, a tour only requires a days notice at most. No place feels this more than Uyuni. The decrease in total visitors combined with the unfortunate but accurate description of Uyuni as a place to spend as little time as possible has left the town, devoid of nearly any other income, in a bad way. In fact the town’s reputation is so bad that the preferred backpacker trail involves arriving via night bus in the early hours, jumping on a Salar tour the same day, electing most often for the three day tour that ends far from Uyuni in the South of Bolivia. The only time in town spent in a cafe waiting on the tour start. Uyuni, gateway to one of Earth’s great natural wonders, is avoided at all costs. The backpackers came, but prosperity did not follow.

After lunch we shop around and finally settle on a one day tour with a company. Our one mission complete, we attempt to find something to entertain us but fail miserably. I want desperately to give Uyuni my money. I have no idea where the tour money goes, clearly it is not staying local, but outside of lunch and a coffee shop there is nothing to do, nothing to see. We return to the hostel to read and lounge around, reluctantly venturing out into the cold again for dinner, where we are again the only people in a restaurant.

The next day we have breakfast at the hostel and then get picked up by our tour, annoyingly over half an hour late.¹ At the office we pay and find out that we will be on the tour alone due to no one wanting to do a one day tour anymore. Our first stop is the train graveyard, which is exactly what it sounds like. We climb around this tetanus factory for a half hour, treating this monument to the death of industry and doom of a town like a playground, before loading up with our guide Abraham to head into the Salar itself.

The Salar de Uyuni is a desert of salt nearly the size of Connecticut. Formed by the drying up of prehistoric saline lakes, it is an incredibly flat, perfectly white expanse that resembles nothing else I have ever seen. Our first stop on our tour is processing plant where they turn the salt of the Salar into something that can be sold, and where we buy bath salts for various friends. Next we head to the pools of water that break certain parts of the Salar, fed from underground rivers that occasionally collide in their paths and there break the surface. The water is thought to have healing properties and people often bathe in the summer. From there we head out to the salt hotel, built entirely of, you guessed it, salt. The journey is when the Salar really comes into its own. The whiteness stretches seemingly into eternity. The hotel still holds a monument to the Dakar race, held in 2018 in Bolivia, as well as a flag mountain assembled by travelers over time. We have lunch in the hotel on seats and a table made of salt. Then it is on to the island of giant cactus. Here the salt flat begins to play games with the eyes. Mountains that seem a few kilometers away never get closer no matter how fast you drive towards them. The island rises before us, but it takes impossibly long for us to reach it. Called Incahuasi, meaning Inca’s rest due to it being used as a way stop for the Inca when crossing the Salar, it is a tiny alien world surrounded by a different alien world. The only life, other than a lone cat, are the giant cacti that rise from the island, itself composed as much of dead coral as of rock. We hike the circuit before returning to the jeep for the final two stops of the tour and fun with cameras.

We drive for another hour before Abraham stops the jeep suddenly at a stretch of white that looks exactly like every other stretch of white. But something about this location he deems perfect for our upcoming photo shoot. The unique environment of the Salar, the endless stretch of flat white, makes it a perfect location to toy with perspective. And Abraham is an expert. With props in tow and a towel to lay on he directs us into numerous poses, including allowing Megan to finally have a height advantage. He even tries to make our toy llama work, despite it being much too small. After this he takes us to the “playa”² a stretch of the Salar covered by about 2 inches of water. The water sitting on the white salt of the Salar creates an almost perfect mirror, and here we watch the sun set. A weird side effect of travel is that I have been on about 16,000 sunset or sunrise tours. I am almost never impressed anymore. The sun comes up, it is orange, then there is light. They all look the same and are virtually never worth waking up early.³ Sunsets are a little better, if only because there are clouds for the sun to play with and you don’t have to wake up early. So when I say the sunset, the way it reflected perfectly off the Salar, was awe inspiring, know that I mean it. We took a hundred photos, and our guide aided us with several more, and we left as the sun went down.⁴

The next day I wandered to the bus station, or rather the street on which buses stop, and booked us tickets for Potosi. The 4 hour bus ride wound through multi-colored mountains teeming with alpaca farms and stone houses, climbing slowly upwards until it reached the city, at an endurance testing 4000 meters above sea level. From the bus station we grabbed a taxi to Koala Hostel, chosen because it was the only one that specified it had heaters.

Legend has it that a lost alapaca herder started a fire while sheltering from the weather and was shocked to see a trickle of silver emerge from the flame. This flame revealed the location of the Cerro Rico and the richest source of silver in human history. The city of Potosi sprang up at the foot of the mountain almost overnight, and soon was one of the largest cities in the Americas and the Spanish Empire’s greatest source of wealth. Today that former glory can be seen in the largest collection of colonial architecture in Bolivia.

Our first night in Potosi involved us stumbling upon a very nice cocktail bar, and being that quality cocktails are often difficult to come by on the road, we maybe overindulged a tiny amount. That overindulgence and the 1000 meter rise in altitude combined to give me my worst bout of altitude sickness of the trip. I woke up at 4 the following morning literally gasping for air. I do not know if you have ever woken up because you can’t breathe, but it is one of the scariest things I have ever experienced. For the rest of the night/morning I was unable to return to sleep, laying my head down and beginning to drift off resulted only in more breathing issues. Sitting up I was able to regulate my breath each time, almost as if my body had forgotten how to breathe automatically and required my brain’s full attention to do it manually. It was not a fun experience. By the time Megan awoke I had accepted my fate as a manual breather, and also accepted that no matter how bad I felt I probably needed to eat. So we headed out, and I struggled with every single step. Eventually admitting defeat and eating at the first restaurant we came across and chugging coca tea.⁵ Needless to say not much else was accomplished that day.

There are two main things to do in Potosi: admire the colonial architecture and visit the mines. We opted only for number one. The mines are still active today, though now the majority of the wealth comes from tin and zinc. The history of the mine is filled with all the brutality and tragedy one might expect; the first miners were Indigenous Americans forced to work the mine under the infamous mita, a form of forced labor originating with the Inca and corrupted into a wretched efficiency by the Spanish. Total estimates of deaths of Indigenous Americans under the mita range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. Today the mine, sometimes called the mountain that eats men, maintains its hunger. The average life expectancy of miners is 40 years, and miners start their labor as young as 14. For us, to treat the mine as a tourist attraction, did not feel right.

But to visit Potosi, or really anywhere in Bolivia,⁶ is to visit the mine. It was the mine that brought wealth to city, allowing for the construction of all those beautiful buildings. It was the mine that bankrupted Spain through inflation, leaving its empire ripe for revolution.⁷ Even today it was the mine, or rather the support of the miners, that brought Evo Morales to power in Bolivia. And needless to say it is markets like the US and EU that buy the zinc and tin extracted by those children. Maybe skipping the mine makes us better people, or maybe seeing it for ourselves and confronting that reality would make us more likely to try and help. As someone at the hostel put it “whether you visit or not, those children work those mines, and the minerals they produce end up in your cell phone.”

After a few days enjoying with some guilt the beauty of Potosi, climbing three breath stealing towers, visiting two gorgeous churches, another turn at the cocktail bar, and one failed attempt at visa extension because we were too early, it was time to return to La Paz. So we hopped on another brutal night bus and arrived at 7 in the morning, this time choosing a Selina’s hostel because they had heaters in the room.⁸ Our first order of business was to get that visa extension. US citizens only get approved for 30 days initially, and having used up 27 of them with a lot we still wanted to see, we had to go apply for an extension at the immigration office. The thing about the extension is it starts from the day you get approved, so if you do it on day five, you get a total of 35 days. Because of this, as we learned in Potosi, immigration officials usually won’t consider your request until you have three or fewer days left. So we had to wait and hope. We arrived at the office with three days left and signed in, then the trouble began. One lady told us to wait till our name appeared on the screen. When it did we approached the appropriate window and there a different lady told us this was the wrong window and sent us to window one. As we approached window one the first lady began to yell at us to sit down and wait till our name is on the screen. I tried to explain to her that it was and we were following instructions, but she was having none of it. All of this of course is happening in Spanish, so I understand about half of what is happening and am able to communicate about a third of what I want to say. Lady two gets in on the act and adds her voice to the fray, but this creates more confusion. Finally a third lady takes pity on us, or becomes annoyed with the yelling, and jumps in, grabs our passports, and sorts us out. We leave slightly frazzled but with 30 more days to enjoy the country.

The primary reason we wanted the passport extension was to make sure we had time to visit one of Earth’s great natural wonders; the Amazon rainforest. So with our extensions in hand, we booked flights for the following Monday, leaving us the weekend to enjoy La Paz a second time. It did provide us an opportunity to view the Gran Poder, an absolutely giant 18 hour parade in which every region, city, trade union, and ethnic group sends a group of participants in traditional⁹ costume to dance, march, and occasionally drink their way down La Paz’s largest boulevard. A spectacle it was, also a traffic nightmare. By Sunday the whole city slept off their collective hangover and we prepared to visit the jungle, Bolivian style.

1More annoying for Megan. Bless her she is the most amazing travel partner, but Latin American time is a very real thing and if timeliness is important to you, or you often worry or have anxiety that something has gone wrong, Latin America will make it worse.

2Yes I did blast the Loona classic “Vamos a la Playa” on the way there. Why do you ask?

3In fact they are often the worst time to go. Places like Tikal and Machu Picchu are as often as not covered by a layer of fog that doesn’t lift until the sun is well into the sky, rendering the whole adventure a waste of otherwise good sleeping time.

4And it got COLD. I would not want to be on the Salar at night.

5I don’t know if Coca Tea does anything. Locals all swear by it, and backpackers turn to it as soon as the first inkling of altitude issues appear. But the science is shaky. It is a stimulant, so many suggest it works in the same way coffee helps with a hangover. It could also be a placebo effect. But when the symptoms strike it is nice to have something to turn to.

6Or really really anywhere in the former Spanish Empire. The history of the Spanish Empire post conquest is the history of Potosi and the wealth it brought.

7Also Napolean

8A note on Selina’s. They are a hostel chain primarily in South America though with some presence in other continents that provides an experience that is to hosteling what glamping is to camping. They almost always have bars (though this one weirdly didn’t) are meticulously clean, have restaurants, provide lots of activities, arrange all your transport for you, all for a hefty mark up from the typical hostel experience. They are popular with posh Brits and rich Americans and allow one to live the backpacker life without ever having to do the work of backpacking. But like I said this one had heaters.

9Or at least extravagant