Why Not Bolivia?: From Machu Picchu into Bolivia in search of the Garden of Eden

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Peru earns twenty billion dollars a year from tourism. Bolivia, earns less than one. Why Not Bolivia? begins with that gap and traces it to its roots: not in geography, not in culture, but in the stories a country tells about itself.Calvin Korponai moves through Bolivia’s regions with both the intimacy of someone who grew up inside them and the analytical clarity of someone who has spent years asking why the rest of the world hasn’t arrived yet.From the Salar de Uyuni to the lost hydraulic cities of the Amazon, from the silver mines of Potosí to the wine valleys of Tarija, Why Not Bolivia? makes the case that this landlocked country is not merely underrated. It is, by nearly every measure that matters (ecological range, civilizational depth, cultural continuity, agricultural diversity), one of the most extraordinary places on earth.Drawing on archaeology, political history, food culture, and the hard economics of tourism, Korponai builds an argument that is part love letter, part indictment, and entirely his own: that Bolivia is the closest thing we have to the Garden of Eden. Read more