Bolivia

Bolivia was the one that broke my brain a little. Coming from Kathmandu I thought I knew high altitude — but La Paz sits in a canyon at nearly 3,700 metres and the air just hits different, thin and cold and somehow electric. The city drops steeply into a bowl of orange and brick-red buildings, and when you eat at a rooftop place at dusk the whole basin glows like a coal fire. I kept stopping in the street just to look at things: a building clad entirely in Iron Man armour, a gorge of pale clay spires cutting right through the urban edge, a market stall selling Singani next to flamingo sculptures.

Then there is Uyuni. I had seen pictures of the salt flat my whole life and I still wasn't ready for the actual scale of it — the way the white crust stretches to every horizon with nothing breaking it, and the sky above is a perfect hard blue. It got cold fast once the sun dropped, the kind of cold that makes your fingers ache in minutes, but the light at that hour turned the whole flat into a mirror of gold and copper. We set a table out there in the middle of nothing for dinner, two wine glasses and a checked cloth, and it was absurd and perfect.

The Cementerio de Trenes just outside Uyuni town is a different kind of place — rows of rusted locomotive hulks slowly sinking into the grit under a hard sun. The metal has gone deep orange and the boilers have split open. There is something very quiet about it, not sad exactly, just slow. Bolivia felt like that in general: things moving at their own pace, on their own terms, completely indifferent to what you expected.