Eight days in Bolivia: a week spent above three thousand metres, and worth every headache

El Alto is the highest international airport in the world and the road from it drops five hundred metres into the city, which is a strange way to arrive anywhere. Walk slowly through the terminal, take a radio taxi, and plan on doing almost nothing.

San Francisco is the right first stop because it is downhill from everything. The church went up in the eighteenth century after snow collapsed the original, and indigenous masons cut the facade full of things the friars had not specified: parrots, pumas, chirimoya fruit, masked faces. The monastery next door is a museum, and the ticket takes you through the cloisters and out onto the roof.

Uphill from the plaza, Calle Linares becomes the Mercado de las Brujas. The stalls sell dried llama foetuses to be buried in the foundations of a new house as an offering to Pachamama, along with herbs, amulets and sweets for burnt offerings. The customers are locals rather than tourists, so ask before photographing anybody's stall.

Plaza Murillo is the political heart and calmer than its history. The cathedral takes one side and the old presidential palace another; the square is named for Pedro Domingo Murillo, hanged here in 1810 for leading the first rising against Spain. The clock on the congress building runs anticlockwise on purpose.

Two blocks away, MUSEF is the best single hour in La Paz. Bolivia recognises three dozen indigenous languages, and the ethnographic museum treats their masks, weaving and ritual objects as living practice rather than as artefacts. The textile rooms in particular repay slow looking.

Spend the afternoon on the cable car. Take a line from the canyon floor up the wall, change once, and watch the city fall away below until you can see the whole shape of the place with Illimani behind it. Get out in El Alto, which is flatter, higher and overwhelmingly Aymara, and on Thursdays and Sundays holds one of the largest street markets on the continent. Keep the bag in front of you and come back down before dark.

Go south in the morning, past the wealthy suburbs where the air gets noticeably thicker, to the Valle de la Luna. It is a hillside of soft clay and sandstone cut by rain into hundreds of thin pale spires, with two waymarked circuits threading between them, one of a quarter of an hour and one nearer three quarters. Take the longer one and go early, before the buses.

Back in the centre, the Coca Museum is two small rooms on Calle Linares and much denser than it looks: four thousand years of Andean use of the leaf, the nineteenth century isolation of the alkaloid, Coca-Cola, and what the war on drugs did to this country. The labels are Spanish and the translation booklet is handed to you at the door.

Finish at the Musical Instrument Museum a few streets away, founded by the charango master Ernesto Cavour and full of things he invented, including guitars with several bodies. You are allowed to play a number of the exhibits, which is not something most museums permit.

The flight from El Alto to Uyuni takes about an hour and crosses the whole altiplano, which is worth a window seat. Give yourself plenty of time for the road up to the airport; it is a long climb through traffic and it closes when there is a march.

Uyuni is a grid of low buildings, a clock tower, one street of tour agencies and a great deal of wind. Drop the bags and book tomorrow, walking the agencies and looking at the vehicles rather than the posters. Ask the vehicle's age, how many share the car, and whether the island fee and lunch are included, and do not take the cheapest offer: breakdowns hours out on the salt are common.

Then go out to the train graveyard, three kilometres southwest along the old line. Steam locomotives and rolling stock, most of them British-built and shipped up from the Pacific, have stood there since the mining traffic dried up in the middle of the last century, stripped of everything removable and rusted red. Go late in the day, when the groups have gone and the light is low.

The first stop is Colchani, on the eastern edge, where salt is scraped into cones to drain and processed in sheds, and where a strip of stalls sells salt, llama wool and carved blocks. Then the vehicles drive out onto the flat and the sense of scale disappears entirely.

There is nothing to look at, which is the point. White in every direction, hexagonal cracks under your boots, mountains floating on haze at a distance you cannot judge, and no object anywhere of a known size. This is why every driver carries a bag of props and every group spends half an hour photographing somebody apparently being eaten by a plastic dinosaur. It is the only way to record how flat it is.

Lunch is usually on Isla del Pescado, a lump of fossilised coral rising out of the salt and covered in giant cactus, some ten metres tall and growing about a centimetre a year, with a path to the top and a small entrance fee. Between December and April the whole thing changes character: standing water turns the salar into a mirror, and the drivers know where to park for the reflection at sunset.

It is six to eight hours east by road, climbing to Potosí at over 4,000 metres and then dropping steadily into the valleys. Do it in daylight: the altiplano stretch is bleak and beautiful, and Potosí with its silver mountain behind it is worth seeing even from a bus window.

Sucre arrives as a relief. The air is thicker, the evening is warm for the first time in a week, and everything is white.

Walk down to Plaza 25 de Mayo when you have dropped the bags. It is named for the rising of 25 May 1809, one of the first anywhere in Spanish America, and it works as the town's living room: bandstand, palms, arcades, benches on four sides and shoeshine boys who will not take no for an answer. Eat late and outdoors.

Cal Orck'o is a working cement quarry five kilometres north, and in 1994 the excavation exposed a limestone wall standing at seventy degrees covered in dinosaur footprints. The rock was a lake shore in the late Cretaceous and the rising Andes tipped it onto its edge, so tracks laid down flat now climb a cliff. More than five thousand have been counted, including one sauropod trail hundreds of metres long. Take the morning trip, which walks you down to the base of the wall.

In the afternoon, the Casa de la Libertad on the main square. This former Jesuit chapel is the room where Bolivia's declaration of independence was signed in August 1825 and where the new republic took its name from Bolívar, and the museum around it holds the first national flag and a good deal of unresolved argument about the men on the walls. Entry includes a guided tour, which is the only way in.

Then walk up Calle Dalence to La Recoleta on the hill at the eastern end of town for the last of the light. The Franciscan monastery there has a cloister with an ancient cedar in it and a long stone bench under white arches outside, which is where the city goes to watch the sun set over its own roofs.

The ASUR museum on the way up towards La Recoleta shows the textiles of two nearby peoples, the Jalq'a and the Tarabuco, and the difference between them is startling once somebody has pointed it out. Tarabuco weaving is ordered and striped; Jalq'a weaving is a black and red world of distorted animals with no ground and no sky. Weavers usually work in the courtyard and the shop sells at fair prices.

Then take a taxi south to the Castillo de la Glorieta, which is either the strangest building in Bolivia or the most endearing. Francisco Argandoña and Clotilde Urioste made a silver fortune, spent much of it on orphanages, and in 1898 were made prince and princess of La Glorieta by Pope Leo XIII. They then built a palace with a Moorish tower, a Byzantine dome, a Gothic wing and a Venetian canal, all at the same time.

It stands on the road towards the airport, half an hour further south, so it is the last stop rather than a detour.