Before first visiting Bolivia, it helps to read a bit of history.  Take the city of Potosi for example.  Today it's a clay-colored, ends-of-the-earth sort of place.  In colonial times, with its silver mines booming and smelters roaring night and day, Potosi was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world.   The glacial peaks of the Royal Range, or the isolated 20,000-foot volcanic outlyers on the Altiplano such as Nevado Sajama, seem aloof, a mere panoramic backdrop.  Yet on closer inspection, you find a ritual path leading up a mountainside here, linking a small chapel in the valley below with a rocky summit.  The stone cairns on ridges and at passes have fresh offerings of coca leaves, the guttering remains of votive candles, and carefully placed llama bone and starfish sacrifices.  These mountains are a living part of the community, and you the visitor must be continually mindful.  Treat the land with reverence and respect, and the Bolivians will reciprocate.

The Uyuni Salt Flat, in the far south of the country, is an enormously popular destination these days for backpackers.   Flamingos at 12,500 feet elevation?  Check.  Active volcanoes?  Check.  People living in seemingly uninhabitable and impossibly harsh outback?  Check and check.

Bolivia is not an easy country in which to travel.   A certain amount of austerity and oddity will be a part of most visitors' experience.  Therein lies its attraction.   After Peru's Sacred Valley of the Incas has been strip-malled from Pisaq to Ollantaytambo, and after they have built that cablecar to Machu Picchu, and after the last great Chilean whitewater river has been dammed up for hydroelectricity, Bolivians will still be struggling with their internal problems, and arguing with Chile about their historic claim to access to the Pacific Ocean.  Bolivia will remain quirkily and stubbornly unique.

Returning home on market day, Copacabana

Aymara girl, Lake Titicaca