Salt, Strangers, and Sweet Home Alabama: Bolivia & Chile Beyond the Guidebook

La Paz, Bolivia and San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. November, 2022

After months of punishing work schedules—seventy, maybe eighty hours a week—I decided I needed a hard reset. There are moments in life when you trade the comfort of control for the chaos of possibility, and South America seemed as good a place as any to let go. I took a month off, handed fate the keys, and booked a flight.

Touchdown in La Paz. The kind of city where the air itself feels thin and unpredictable, just like my mood. Maybe it was the altitude, maybe just nerves—I found myself skittish, unreasonably cautious, like I’d forgotten how to talk to strangers. It’s a strange thing to travel solo and feel so unwilling to step outside yourself. Wasn’t meeting people supposed to be the point?

But Bolivia has a way of coaxing you out. One moment I was a quiet observer; a few days later, I was roaring “Sweet Home Alabama” in the middle of the Salar de Uyuni, crammed in a 4x4 with new friends while salt flats stretched to nowhere. The song wasn’t about home—it was a reminder that sometimes home is wherever you’re together, voices rattling off-key in a place nobody expected to be.

By the time I hit San Pedro de Atacama, the shell had cracked. We hiked and drank and traded stories deep into the chilly desert night. There was a party out there—music pulsing with dust, laughter bouncing off moonlit rocks. I took a screenshot of my location, convinced I’d find it again. Of course, the party had evaporated by morning. That’s travel for you: memories perfect, but impossible to recreate.

And the World Cup—what better place to be an outsider than in a Chilean bar packed shoulder-to-shoulder with England fans, me waving a lone American flag nobody else cared to salute. Sports, like travel, bring out good-natured enemies and lifelong friends in equal measure.

A year on, I’m working my way up Acatenango volcano in Guatemala, and who do I meet except one of those desert party comrades. The only thing more reliable than bad instant coffee is the universe’s ability to loop strangers back into your story.

Here’s what the long road through Bolivia and Chile taught me—connection lurks everywhere, often when you’re least ready for it. The real altitude? Found in those unpredictable, joyful encounters. When you look back, it’s always the people—never the itinerary—who give a trip its soul.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Patagonia, if you believe in magic at the edge of the world.