As the plane descended toward La Paz–El Alto International Airport, I knew what it was that Neil Armstrong felt as he lowered Apollo 11 onto the Moon. Hidden among the seemingly never-ending peaks and valleys of the South American Andean ridge, La Paz is among the most unlikely capital cities. It sits in a giant, bowl-like valley where sharp ridges and conical summits meet the altiplano — a vast expanse of mountain plateau desert.

Landing an aircraft in El Alto, which spills dramatically from a shelf down into a valley where La Paz is situated, is no easy task. The city lies at an altitude of 13,615 feet (4,150 m). I had the fortune of sitting next to a Bolivian flight engineer named Jorge, who reassured me that it was perfectly normal for the wings of the plane to be vertical to the ground as it u-turned, circling slowly over the city, descending enough to be able to hit the runway head on (so to speak).

La Paz, which translates as “The Peace,” seems an odd name for a city whose locals recount stories of poverty and scandal.

“Being the world’s second-highest international airport, and with such a complicated landing, pilots need special training to land in La Paz,” Jorge informed me moments before touch down. “NASA even does testing up here.”

Still feeling somewhat tense from my emergency landing on a different flight the day before, I wasn’t sure if this was a good or bad thing to know. As I dared myself to look out of the window, however, my fear took a backseat to complete wonderment.

To look down on this harsh, rugged beauty, so unfathomably vast and inhospitable, conjured images of far-away worlds. The view was simply breathtaking, a state I was to become accustomed to in Bolivia.

A favorite conversation topic among South American travelers is the degree to which altitude sickness renders them useless for their first few days in Bolivia. While I must admit I thought it all to be a bit of traveler’s hype, upon stepping off the plane I was instantly and disconcertingly proven wrong.

With the feeling of walking across the deck of a ship in a force 5 gale, my traveling companion and I managed to get our throbbing heads and nauseated stomachs into a hostel in the center of La Paz. Twenty-four hours later, breathless and weak, we emerged to discover that we had in fact not landed on the Moon, but had instead found ourselves deposited in a bygone age.

There seems to be almost too much going on all at the same moment in La Paz to be able to take any of it in. The deafening noise of the smoldering traffic and seemingly aimless shouting coming from every possible angle seem to echo off the walls of the bowl in which La Paz is shoe-horned.

Women waddle down the street staggering under the weight of their multilayered traditional dress, bowler hats balanced precariously atop their heads, baskets containing their livelihood in each hand and a small child slung over their backs.

The lights of El Alto, the cities’ poorest favela-style (shantytown) district, twinkle as the buildings defy gravity, clinging to the sides of a vertical cliff, their smog-blackened facades closing in on the narrow, vertical lanes that radiate outward and upward from the central main street. Makeshift markets, stalls selling everything and nothing, litter the streets. Balaclava-masked shoe shiners, implying a more sinister profession, grossly outnumbered shineable shoes.

After acclimatizing not only to the thin air, but to the energetic bustle of the city center, it was time to find out what hidden secrets this hectic, desperately developing city had to offer.