Comment by mharig
12 days ago
There are a lot more places worth the visit in Bolivia, apart from the Yungas and Potosí. Salar de Uyuni, Sucre (especially the Indigenous Art and Textiles Museum), National Reserve Torotoro, Pantanal (the Bolivian part is better than the Brasilian part), Tarija, and a lot more.
Bolivia is at least as safe as the USofA. Just stay out of Chapare and keep an eye on your money and passport when traveling with bus (and of course in crowded places, but this is true for near the whole planet).
Also, if you're interested in History and enjoy "off the beaten path" type of tourism, it's 100% worth the ~8 hour ride from Santa Cruz to visit La Higuera, the little pueblo where the Bolivian Government captured and executed Che Guevara. The schoolhouse that they executed him in is now converted into a tiny little museum, and the whole town has art and statues of him, it's a super interesting place.
Par for the course. They may as well have one for Butch Cassidy too.
https://visitidaho.org/things-to-do/museums-exhibits/butch-c...
I’m not sure if you’re suggesting Che Guavara wasn’t assassinated, wasn’t assassinated in La Higuera, or that the museum dedicated to memorializing this historical event is either insincere or simply trading on Guevara’s memory as a cynical cash grab…so tldr; WTF are you on about?
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Cochabamba(Chapare) indeed known for gangs and drugs, and also for the water war against privatization of water company(influenced James bond Quantom of solace)
In 2019 there were protests after alleged election fraud, Evo morales the president fled out of the country
In La Paz was a hotspot for tourists abduction in the early 2000s, there is also a known market of stolen goods
I had a visit from Interpol in a hostel in Sucre couple of years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_Water_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_protests
Interpol is an organisation for cooperation between national police organisations. They don't visit ordinary citizens or tourists, nor are they allowed to do any police actions in (other) countries. Are you sure that wasn't part of some (attempted) scam?
No I'm not; I was surprised(for some reason I though Interpol is a european thing) and showed some resistant but they just wanted to check in. I did look up now and found multiple cases where interpol was involved in bolivia as well as car with the logo, and officers with hats \_o_/
Seeing other countries from the reductionist lens of tourism is the McDonalization of humanity. Now the human condition has been reduced to a list of superficial and trivialized activities on Tripadvisor.
Take a selfie next to a statue, eat at a restaurant, buy some souvenir made in China... now you can check a country in your country list and say "I have been to n+1 countries". What was the cost? burning a massive amount of plane fuel to get you there that is equivalent to you burning your trash for a full year, something that in a planet governed by a rational species would be illegal to do.
The article talks about something much more profound. Long distance tourism is at our current technological level a planet-killing industry and should be outlawed.
Car dependent suburban sprawl necessitating 3 hours a day commutes by car 5 days a week,50 weeks a year is a much heavier load on the planet than an annual plane trip .
Yes, also don't do that if you can avoid it. You can always avoid tourism.
Good thing I don't have a car.
McDonalds flopped in Bolivia :)