Bolivia

Bolivia is South America with the surrealism dial turned up. The Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, is the centrepiece: in dry season a blinding white geometry stretching past the curve of the earth, in wet season a mirror so perfect that vehicles appear to drive across the sky. You sleep beside it in hotels built of salt. The high-altitude deserts beyond keep the strangeness coming: blood-red lagoons crowded with flamingos, steaming geysers at dawn, stone trees carved by wind. La Paz, the world's highest major city, tumbles down a canyon beneath snowpeaks, its cable cars doubling as the best city tour anywhere. Add Lake Titicaca's floating islands and colonial Sucre's white courtyards. Bolivia asks a little more of travellers and repays it with scenes found nowhere else on earth.