Travel Guide Bolivia: Route from La Paz to Uyuni
After our round trip through Peru, we continued on to Bolivia by bus. From Puno and Cusco, there are regular (night) buses that cross the border. In our opinion, Bolivia can be perfectly combined with Peru! In this article, we describe all the stops and activities we did in Bolivia. From a true mountain trek to a multi-day tour across the largest salt flat in the world: read our complete travel guide Bolivia below.
This Bolivia travel guide only covers the western part of the country. We deliberately skipped the lower-lying regions because we had already seen plenty of jungle in places like Costa Rica. That said, there are a lot of options to visit this part of the country on multi-day tours. We also skipped the towns of Potosí (with its mining history) and Sucre. This was due to the further planning of our trip to Chile and the elections in Bolivia. Did you know that basically nothing is open in Bolivia during elections?
La Paz (5–7 Nights)
Accommodation: Raven La Paz
Activities: Laguna Esmeralda, Huayna Potosí
We chose La Paz as our base for a week, using it as a starting point for several day trips and multi-day tours. La Paz itself feels very safe, especially in the tourist areas. There are plenty of nice and affordable places to eat. For convenience, we saved many of them in our Google Maps Travel Guide Bolivia.
Note: one of us had quite a bit of trouble with the food, which apparently is fairly common in Bolivia. During tours, water is always boiled. Because you’re at a higher altitude, water boils at a lower temperature, which means not all bacteria may be killed.
In La Paz, you can get around by cable car. For 3 Bolivianos per person, you can take a ride. If you get off along the way, you’ll have to pay again. The cable cars run every day and you almost never have to wait!
Laguna Esmeralda
From La Paz, we took a day trip to Laguna Esmeralda. You reach an altitude of around 5,000 meters, making it a great acclimatization hike if, like us, you plan to climb Huayna Potosí. The lake is supposed to have a beautiful green-blue color, but during our visit there was not much to see, because the weather suddenly turned very bad.
Huayna Potosí
As one of the “easiest” 6,000-meter peaks in the world, we decided to take a chance and attempt to climb Huayna Potosí. The climb certainly wasn’t easy, as hiking at this altitude is physically very demanding. However, because no real technical climbing is required, it was possible for us to reach the summit. To share our full experience, we wrote a separate blog about climbing Huayna Potosí in Bolivia.
Uyuni and Salt Flats (5–7 Nights)
Accommodation: Hotel de Sal Reina del Salar
Activities: Salt Flats tour to Chile, Potosí
The next stop of your travel route in Bolivia is Uyuni. You really only need to stay here for one day, as there isn’t much to do in town itself. We would have liked to do a one- or two-day trip to Potosí to learn more about its mining history. However, because elections were taking place during our visit, no buses were running. From Uyuni, most travelers join a multi-day tour to the largest salt flat in the world. At the end of the tour, you can cross the border into Chile!
A tour across the salt flats is an absolute must during a round trip through Bolivia. Our main tip is to negotiate well on the price. In our group of six, every couple had paid a different price, and the differences were quite significant! Check out everything about the multi-day tour across the Bolivian salt flats in our separate article.
