Bogotá to Valparaíso

Two days here because we had to fly through anyway to reach Bolivia. Dinner at Álvaro Clavijo's El Chato in Chapinero.

A morning at MAMBO, the city's modern and contemporary art museum, where the shows were full of copper: the extraction economy, turned into sculpture. Then La Candelaria on foot: the Botero Museum (free, and the best thing in the neighborhood), and the Plaza de Bolívar with the cathedral in afternoon light.

The overnight flight from Bogotá lands you in El Alto at 4,150 meters, and then the city falls away below the runway. La Paz is a bowl with a snowcapped rim. We walked slowly, drank coffee, and let the altitude introduce itself. After lunch, the Museo Marina Núñez del Prado, the house and studio of Bolivia's great sculptor, full of her carved wood and bronze. Then the Fundación Gastón Ugalde in Sopocachi: Ugalde is the Warhol of Bolivia, and his son Mariano took us through the private studio rooms, where Bolivian artists still work.

The full La Paz day. The cable car network here is the largest in the world and it is the public transit system, so for a few bolivianos you ride over the whole city and up to El Alto. It is spotless, and people here say it has made the rest of the city cleaner too, out of pride. The cabins hold eight, and everyone says hello getting in and goodbye getting out. The big stations have dog rescues in them. Lunch was salteñas at Eli's, which is the right lunch in La Paz. Up top are the cholets: the neo-Andean party mansions that Freddy Mamani started building for the new Aymara merchant class, each one louder than the last. Back downhill, the carved front of San Francisco, the Witches' Market, and then the mask hall at the folklore museum, which turned out to be the exceptional collection of the whole trip: a dark room, each mask lit on its own, hundreds of them. We finished at the National Art Museum, where the colonial Virgins hang a room away from a Last Supper of cholitas.

Lunch at Arami in Calacoto with Mariano, who joined us for our last day. It is Marsia Taha's restaurant: she was named Latin America's best female chef in 2024, then left Gustu to open this. Every course is here because every course earned it, and the whole thing was about US$55 a person. Then the General Cemetery, where the dead rent niches by the decade and street artists have painted the walls, and the cable car passes right overhead. We finished on Calle Jaén, the last colonial street in the city.

Our flight from La Paz to Uyuni was cancelled, along with every flight that week: a political fight with the airline. So, the overnight bus, nine hours, then into two 4x4s for three days with a driver each and travelers from Italy, Japan, Switzerland and Brazil, no roads and no phone signal. The train cemetery first, then onto the salt itself: 10,000 square kilometers of it, flat enough that the horizon curves. Isla Incahuasi is a coral island in the middle, covered in cacti that have been growing a centimeter a year for centuries. Two nights on the route, both in hotels built of salt blocks.

The long day. South from the salar across the altiplano: the yareta plants, a chain of lagoons full of flamingos, the stone tree, and finally Laguna Colorada at 4,278 meters, red with algae and white with flamingos. The driver's wife cooked lunch on a grill in a stone hut. Night two in the second salt-block hotel, higher and colder.

Up before dawn for the last leg. An hour in, a wheel came off our truck. Not a flat: the wheel, off, rolling away into the snow. Every other tour truck on the track stopped, the drivers put it back on together, and we crossed the border at Hito Cajón, 4,480 meters, with the Bolivian stamp still wet.

From the border the road drops 1,800 meters in forty minutes into San Pedro, and the air gets thick again. Five nights at Explora Atacama. The deal: every evening you pick the next day's expedition from a board, every morning a guide takes you out. First afternoon, the dunes of the Valle de la Muerte with the volcano Licancabur (5,916 m) watching.

The Rainbow Valley, an hour into the Domeyko mountains: red, green and white rock in bands, from minerals laid down when this was a seabed. Bikes in the afternoon.

Cerro Toco, 5,604 meters. You drive to 5,200 and walk the rest, slowly, in every layer you own. The summit looks across the border into Bolivia. In the afternoon, the salt lagoons at Cejar: saltier than the Dead Sea and much, much colder. I was the only one in our group who went in.

North to Machuca, a village of a few families and one church at 4,000 meters, then a hike down the Puritama river canyon with a guide and Rodrigo and Luna, a couple from DC we met at the lodge and kept hiking with.

The cactus canyon at Guatín, where the river runs through a slot lined with cardón cacti taller than a house. Rodrigo, who is Venezuelan, and Luna, who is Carioca, came along again. Luna fell in the river partway through and took it better than I would have.

A last morning at a private ecological preserve near the lodge: llamas, a horse that wanted in on the photo, and a lesson in grinding flour with a stone mortar and pestle from algarrobo pods and chañar fruit, the two desert trees the Atacameños have been milling for a few thousand years. Then the flight from Calama to Santiago, 2,400 meters down to 570.

Santiago at sea level, almost. We walked Lastarria and the Museo de Artes Visuales, cancelled the big dinner we had booked, and went to Ambrosía in Vitacura instead. It is a family restaurant in an old house with a garden: Carolina Bazán cooks, after years in Paris at Frenchie under Gregory Marchand, and her partner Rosario Onetto runs the room and the wine. It started downtown and moved to the house when it outgrew the space; in 2019 the 50 Best list named Bazán Latin America's best female chef and put Ambrosía at number 30. The food is Chilean and French at once, comfort with precision. Onetto poured us a Carmenère that reorganized our opinions. Carmenère was a Bordeaux grape that vanished from France in the phylloxera years of the 1860s. Cuttings had already gone to Chile, and the vines kept growing for 130 years, mislabeled as Merlot, until a French ampelographer looked closely in 1994 and recognized them. Chile has had the grape to itself ever since. The next night we went to Ambrosía Bistró, a few blocks from the hotel: the smaller, louder sibling Bazán and Onetto opened in 2017. Same hands, same ideas, and several of the same dishes in a second version, which made the two nights a comparison we hadn't planned.

The coast, in a rental car. Viña first: the moai outside the Fonck museum (a real one, from Easter Island), the flower clock, feet in the Pacific. Then Valparaíso, where the hills are painted from the port to the top and you walk up through the murals. Lunch on a terrace, a last look at the cranes, and the drive back to Santiago.

A last day in Las Condes before the night flight to Madrid. The hotel had put up the flag and a hay bale for Fiestas Patrias, which was a week off. We rode the metro to Los Dominicos, walked the park under the Andes, and came back for a pisco sour on the roof.