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TRAVEL- BOLIVIA
FRANCESCO CICCARELLO & SERENA BARONCINI
WHAT HAPPINESS TRULY MEANS
Breathless and speechless, that’ s what Bolivia did to us. A land of brutal beauty and contradictions, where the past and the present wrestle in the open, and where everything, the air, the light, even time itself, feels sharper, harsher, more alive. Bolivia is not a country you simply pass through. It tests you, strips you, and leaves you changed.
We crossed its northern border easily enough, rolling into the fourteenth country of our long road south. Altitude was no longer a surprise, it seemed the GPS refused to read anything below 3,000 metres. The Pan-American Highway unfurled ahead of us like a strip of obsidian cutting across red plateaus, the only scar of humanity in a landscape otherwise shaped entirely by wind and water.
Signs warned of wildlife unknown to us: the Rhea, or Piyo, South America’ s largest bird, a flightless
creature that can weigh up to 30 kilos. We watched them sprint beside the road in loose herds, their long necks bobbing, wary but proud. Llamas and alpacas appeared too, grazing among stone and thorn. We’ d learned to tell them apart by now: llamas, taller and coarsecoated, used as pack animals and for milk; alpacas, smaller and softer, their fleece transformed into the colourful cloaks worn by villagers we passed in bursts of vivid red and blue.
The altitude and dryness bit into our lungs, but we pressed on, into El Alto, the chaotic sprawl above La Paz. Here, life happens in clouds of dust and diesel smoke. Old trucks, coughing black exhaust, thundered past potholes big enough to swallow us whole. Yet, amid the grime, there was movement and purpose, the endless rhythm of a city surviving on its own stubborn energy.
Descending the steep road into
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