Bolivia 7 Day Itinerary: La Paz, Tiwanaku and Salar de Uyuni

Free, 1 hour, in the historic centre. The plane lands in El Alto, at 4,061 metres, and the taxi ride down to La Paz already takes off 400 metres. Do nothing else on day one beyond walking slowly around here.

The square is ringed by the Palacio Quemado, Congress and the cathedral, and there is a clock on the foreign ministry facade that runs backwards, installed in 2014 as a gesture of Andean sovereignty. It is also where you grasp that La Paz is the seat of government while Sucre remains the constitutional capital.

Drink coca tea, eat little and save the hot shower for the evening. Altitude sickness shows up in the first 12 hours and gets worse with effort, alcohol and a heavy dinner.

Free street, 1 hour, 400 metres from the square. Some 300 metres of cobbles, facades in blue, red and yellow, and iron lamps. It is the only street in La Paz that survived the twentieth century whole.

Ten municipal museums are packed in here, among them Precious Metals, Musical Instruments and Coca. A single municipal ticket covers four of them for a few bolivianos. Pick one or two: on day one, standing for hours at 3,600 metres charges you for it.

Included in the Calle Jaen ticket, 30 minutes, on the same street. Maps, uniforms and documents about the War of the Pacific of 1879, when the country lost the 400 kilometres of coast it had. Bolivia still keeps a navy and marks Sea Day on 23 March: this museum is the key to that.

Church free, museum ticketed, 1 hour, on the square of the same name. The present building was finished in 1790, after a snowstorm brought down the first church in the seventeenth century.

Look closely at the facade before you go in: among the baroque scrolls there are mermaids playing the charango, Andean masks, pine cones and parrots, carved by indigenous craftsmen who put their own repertoire inside the Spanish design. This is mestizo baroque, and this is its best facade in La Paz. The museum visit climbs to the roof and the bell towers, with a view of the whole square.

Free street, 45 minutes, up Sagarnaga from the church. Between Linares and Sagarnaga, Aymara vendors set out herbs, incense, tin amulets and dried llama foetuses.

None of it is decoration. The offering table, the mesa dulce, is buried under new buildings as payment to Pachamama, and the llama foetus is its centrepiece. Photograph the stalls, not the vendors, without asking first: here that is frowned upon, and the request is usually granted without fuss.

3 bolivianos per line and 2 per transfer, 40 minutes round trip, at Central / Taypi Uta station. The Red Line opened in May 2014 and was the first of the eleven lines of Mi Teleferico, today the largest urban cable car system in the world.

This is not a tourist ride: it is the bus for people who live in El Alto and work in La Paz. The 400 metre climb takes 10 minutes and shows the whole city wedged into its basin, with the 6,438 metre Illimani at the head of the valley. Sit on the right going up. Between 7am and 9am and at 6pm the queue is long, because it is a real rush hour.

Free, 2 hours, at the 16 de Julio / Jach a Qhathu terminus. The Aymara name of the station means big market, and it is literal: some 200 blocks of stalls and 70,000 people per day.

It only runs on Thursdays and Sundays. If your day 2 falls on another weekday, ride up anyway and walk the Ceja of El Alto to see the cholets, architect Freddy Mamani party buildings, painted in strong colours and full of Aymara geometry. Go by day, carry little cash and nothing of value on show: this is a working market, not a mall.

About 15 bolivianos, 1h30 with the ride, in Mallasa, 10 kilometres south of the centre. Minibus 231 leaves from Calle Sagarnaga and takes 40 minutes for under 5 bolivianos.

The field of pinnacles formed by leaching of the clay of an old lake: the water carried off the salts and left the needles standing. There are two marked trails, of 15 and 45 minutes, both easy. Take the long one, where the landscape closes in and the city disappears.

Set your expectations: the place is smaller than the name suggests and you cover all of it in an hour. What justifies it is the pairing with day 3, the last day of acclimatisation before the salt flat.

Free, 45 minutes, high in Villa Pabon. A taxi is 10 minutes from the centre and a few bolivianos, and it is worth asking the driver to wait, because walking back means going down empty streets.

Killi Killi is a spur that juts into the basin, so the view closes a full circle: the centre below, El Alto on the upper rim and the snow of Illimani behind. Go 40 minutes before sunset, when the brick slopes turn orange and the lights come on from the bottom up. Take a coat: the temperature drops fast once the sun goes.

100 bolivianos for foreigners, 3 hours, 72 kilometres from La Paz, 1h30 by road. Minibuses leave from the Cementerio General in the morning; a taxi hired for the day costs 350 to 500 bolivianos.

Tiwanaku was the capital of an empire that ruled the altiplano between 500 and 1000 AD, centuries before the Incas, and has been a World Heritage Site since 2000. The ticket covers both sites and both museums.

Start at the semi subterranean temple, with the stone heads set into its walls, climb to the Kalasasaya and finish at the Puerta del Sol, the andesite monolith with the central figure in relief. The lithic museum holds the Bennett monolith, 7.3 metres tall. Bring a hat and water: there is no shade anywhere and the sun at 3,850 metres burns in 20 minutes.

Included in the ticket, 1 hour, 1 kilometre from the main site. It is a field of andesite and sandstone blocks cut at right angles, with grooves and drill holes of a precision that earned the place worldwide pseudo archaeological fame.

Radiocarbon dating puts construction between 536 and 600 AD, and Bolivian archaeology explains the cuts through moulds, abrasives and patience. Be honest about what you will see: a field of scattered stones, not a standing temple. The interest is in the precision of the joints, seen up close.

Head back to La Paz in the late afternoon and take the overnight sleeper bus to Uyuni, which leaves the Terminal de Buses around 9pm and arrives at 7am. It is 10 hours and costs 120 to 250 bolivianos. The alternative is the 55 minute morning flight with Ecojet or BoA.

Free, 1 hour, 3 kilometres from the centre of Uyuni. Dozens of British steam locomotives have rusted beside the tracks since the 1940s, when mining collapsed and the line that carried ore to the Pacific stopped.

Every salt flat tour starts here, which means that by 10.30am there are five jeeps and thirty people climbing on the wagons. Come by taxi on your own right after the night bus, around 9am, and the place is yours. Mind the metal: it is rusted, sharp and entirely unguarded.

Free, museum 10 bolivianos, 1h30, 22 kilometres from Uyuni on the edge of the flat. This is the village that lives off the harvest: salt is scraped from the crust, piled into cones to dry in the sun, then iodised and bagged in brick sheds.

The Llama and Salt Museum is small and explains both trades of the region well. The workshop street sells the same carved salt pieces you will see across the flat, and here they cost less.

Sleep in Uyuni, not in a salt hotel out on the flat: the next day starts early and the hotels in the middle charge three times as much for the novelty of the walls.

Included in the tour, 30 minutes, a few kilometres from Colchani. These are holes about a metre across in the crust, where groundwater rises under pressure and bubbles all day long.

Do not get in and do not let children near the edge: the crust around them is thin and the water is at altiplano spring temperature. It is the spot that shows what the salt flat really is, a salt shell up to 10 metres thick over a brine that has never stopped moving.

Included in the tour, 45 minutes, 25 kilometres out from Colchani. The monument was built from salt blocks in 2014, when the Dakar Rally crossed Bolivia for the first time, and became the stopping point for the flags and the jeep convoy photo.

Beside it stands Playa Blanca, the first salt hotel built out on the flat, now a museum. This is where most groups take the forced perspective photos, the ones where a person fits in someone else palm: ask the guide for the wide angle lens and allow 20 minutes, because it takes more work than it looks.

30 bolivianos, 2 hours, 80 kilometres from Colchani, at the centre of the flat. The island is coral rock, the remains of a volcano submerged in the lake that once stood here, and is covered in Echinopsis cacti up to 10 metres tall, which grow about a centimetre a year.

The loop trail takes 40 minutes and climbs to the top, from where the flat is a white surface horizon to horizon. In the wet season, December to March, the island is sometimes unreachable and the tour swaps it for the mirror effect. Confirm with the agency before paying, because neither version is bad, but they are different trips.

Finish with sunset on the flat, which most tours keep for last, and drive back to Uyuni in the evening.

Free, cave 20 bolivianos, 1h30, 120 kilometres from Uyuni along the northern shore. Coqueza is a handful of adobe houses and a small church on the edge of the flat, and it is where the Tunupa climb begins.

A few minutes from the village, a cave holds five pre Inca mummies, preserved by the dry air and the cold of the altiplano, still with skin, hair and cloth. A local opens the gate and accompanies the visit. It is a real burial site, not a set piece: go in quietly and touch nothing.

About 30 bolivianos community fee, 4 hours, starting from Coqueza. The jeep climbs to around 4,600 metres and from there it is a 1h30 walk to the crater viewpoint, at about 5,000. The summit, at 5,321 metres, needs a full day and a guide.

Do this on the last day and not the first: after six days above 3,600 metres the body has made the red cells it needs, and the same climb that would be punishing on arrival becomes a long, slow walk. Go up slowly, drink plenty of water and turn back without guilt if your head hurts.

The reward is the crater with its red, yellow and green bands and the whole salt flat below, white to the curve of the earth. Head back to Uyuni in the late afternoon and take the flight or the night bus to La Paz.