Huayna Potosi tops out at 19,974 ft and is probably the easiest 6000m peak in South America. There are a dozen companies selling guide services up this and other peaks out of La Paz and most seem willing to take anyone. I was planning on using this lightly technical summit as a warm up to something more interesting like Illimani (6,438m / 21,201 ft) but despite my best prep, I got severe altitude sickness from the jump on summit day. I still struggled my way to the summit under extreme nausea but I’d call it a summit in very bad form.
After the Salar de Uyuni salt flats we quested out to explore SW Bolivia to an extent I didn’t expect. This “mostly driving” tour took us to so many unexpected environmental spots: salt flat lakes, eroded sandstone boulders, flamingos at 15.000 ft, colorful rainbow mountains with pastel flood planes that look like paintings, chinchilla-like animals, volanic outcroppings that are wind eroded in the middle of a sandy desert, lava flows, 19k peaks, snow, etc. It could have maybe been a bit more active, but it was a pleasure to explore this region of Bolivia and I was plenty entertained creating punny jokes and solving riddles with my travel companion.
I was really unsure whether to visit the enormous 10,500 sq. km. salt flats given many of the promotional pictures looked primed for Instagram and I wasn’t really sure what there was to do there. However, everyone both first-hand and online raved about it being a unique and unmissable place. I’m not a staged photo person and I have had a lot of outdoor experiences… However, I’ll still say the staged photos were actually super fun playing with perspective, the salt landscape strange, the use of salt bricks for construction very novel and the SW Bolivian landscape of high altitude volcanic desert very wierd and interesting. In summary, it was worth the visit.
