A new book titled Why Not Bolivia?, authored by Calvin Korponai with the subtitle "From Machu Picchu into Bolivia in search of the Garden of Eden," argues that Bolivia is a fantastic country to visit — more original than most travelers expect — and sets out to explain why. The subtitle is telling: Bolivia sits in the shadow of its neighbor Peru, whose Machu Picchu draws well over a million visitors a year, while Bolivia itself remains one of South America's least-visited countries relative to its size — which is part of what the book frames as its appeal. Writing at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen recommends the book and notes that Cochabamba is an amazing food city.

An excerpt from the book describes the country's singular highland landscape:

The landscape itself is like nothing else in the Americas. The altiplano is flat in the way that only vast geological formations can be flat, not the flatness of a plain that was once a sea, but the flatness of a plateau that was raised bodily by tectonic forces millions of years ago and then scoured by ten thousand years of wind and ice into the extraordinary emptiness it presents today. The horizon in every direction is uninterrupted. The sky is immense, a dome of blue so saturated at this altitude that photographs rarely convey it accurately, because the camera's sensor cannot process a blue that contains no haze, no moisture, no atmospheric diffusion between the sun and the surface.

The book also captures the striking first impression La Paz makes on arriving travelers:

Arriving at El Alto International Airport (which sits on the altiplano above the city at forty-one hundred meters, making it the highest international airport in the world), you step off the plane into air so thin that the simple act of carrying your luggage to the terminal produces a shortness of breath that is mildly alarming if you have never experienced it and completely normal if you have. The airport itself is unremarkable. What happens next is not. You get into a taxi or bus and the driver takes you to the edge of the altiplano, and then the city appears, not gradually but all at once, a cascade of buildings and lights and terracotta roofs pouring down the walls of a canyon so steep and so deep that the bottom is invisible from the rim. La Paz does not reveal itself slowly. It drops away beneath you like a held breath released.

For readers weighing a trip, the book's emphasis on the altiplano's extremes points to a practical consideration: much of Bolivia's most distinctive terrain — including the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, and Lake Titicaca, which it shares with Peru — sits at elevations comparable to El Alto's, where altitude acclimatization matters for many visitors. The book is available on Amazon. The original post appeared on Marginal Revolution.