Bolivia Motorcycle Tour

Eleven nights from Santa Cruz to La Paz, guided, eighteen hundred kilometres across the Bolivian Andes on a Royal Enfield Himalayan.

Bolivia is a country of extremes and the route takes in most of them: the largest salt flat on earth, the road once rated the world’s most dangerous, and the highest capital city anywhere.

The Andes passes come first through forest and rivers, climbing to four thousand metres onto the Altiplano, where llama herds graze the tufted grass. A full day then crosses the Uyuni salt flat, with the abandoned train cemetery and its rusting steel giants, and a night at the salt hotel. The route turns towards La Paz for the Death Road, which since the new road opened in the 1990s has been left to adventurers: a single lane between thousand-metre cliffs, dense vegetation and waterfalls falling across the surface. Between five and six thousand metre peaks, the cultural stops land: Sucre with its colonial centre intact, Potosi’s silver mine and the old Spanish mint, which made the city the richest in the world in the sixteenth century, and a night in the converted telegraph house in the town where Che Guevara was captured.

Three nights in authentic countryside guesthouses, seven in high-standard hotels and one in simple small-town accommodation are included alongside the riding; the operator rates the difficulty three out of five. Late October and early November are the departure windows, which falls in the dry season at these altitudes. The Death Road is the headline and the Altiplano is the substance: days of open plateau at four thousand metres with almost nothing on it. Twelve days is the right length, and anyone sensitive to altitude should take medical advice before booking.