Larry Memmott's Blog

Exploring Bolivia

If you are looking for spectacular landscapes; unique flora and fauna; friendly, welcoming people; or exotic cultures and traditions, Bolivia is for you.  Bolivia is an incredible country for adventure travel.

This page is my attempt to consolidate the ramblings of my blog into a (admittedly limited) travel guide for Bolivia.  One might ask, with all the travel books available, what the value is of another, online, travel guide.  Traditional travel guides compress huge amounts of information in order to publish a small book you can carry in your pocket.  In contrast, my blog gives me unlimited space to go into minut detail about a specific destination or issue.  I also intend to take advantage of the digital platform to deliver lots of photos, maps, and gps information which would be difficult to deliver or virtually useless to the reader, if presented on paper.

The other aspect of this guide which is different from most travel presentations is that it is written from the perspective of an independent traveler with a vehicle.  While Bolivia can certainly be effectively explored by a well moneyed person willing to pay one of the excellent tour agencies, or by someone willing to travel with a backpack in the backs of trucks with the locals (something I have done), the ideal way of exploring Bolivia is with your own set of wheels.  If you don’t have them already, I recommend renting a 4WD vehicle here in La Paz.

Since this guide will cover only those parts of Bolivia where I have been privileged to travel, the indispensable starting point is still a printed travel guide.  I traveled all over the country with photocopies of the old South American Handbook 25 years ago.  Today, in my view, its offspring, the Footprint Bolivia Handbook, is still the best guide to Bolivia.  Buy it.  You may need to get new reading glasses to go with it, though, as the text has been miniaturized to make it possible to get so much information into your pocket.  For other reading recommendations, go to the Bolivian Andes Bookshelf.

So, with the introductions over, you are ready to move on to the index.

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