I awoke just as the plane’s wheels clawed at the tarmac.  A violent shudder, a lurch, and then, silence.  We had landed.  But this was no ordinary arrival.  It was a daring dance with destiny at the world’s loftiest international airport, El Alto, Bolivia.  Here the air is as thin as a whispered secret and as crisp as a freshly pressed linen shirt.

I gathered both bag and bearings and stepped into the altitude breathing deeply with my trusty leather satchel slung over my shoulder.  At more than 13,000 feet, the air was cool and sharp, like a blade honed on glacier ice.  In the distance the Andes stood sentinel with their snow-capped peaks, the ancient Illimani standing out among them like a silent god.  It’s summer, yet the chill wraps around you like a cashmere shawl, invigorating, unyielding.  The world feels different here, closer to the stars, farther from the ordinary.

The less seasoned fellow travelers clutched oxygen bottles at makeshift bars, gasping like fish out of water.  I walked on, undistracted, captured instead by the neon palaces of Freddy Mamani, the cholets, extravagant, geometric mansions that dared the sky itself to blush. 

But architecture, however splendid, was not my quarry.  No, I had come to this city in the clouds for a whisper, a legend, a culinary grail.  The lightest, fluffiest cream known to humankind.  A cream so divine it could elevate a humble cookie to the sublime.  Said to exist only here, in the rare air above the Altiplano.

The journey began at dawn, my guide navigating a battered jeep along roads that are more suggestion than reality.  Hours passed, the terrain grew more difficult, until the road vanished entirely, swallowed by the rugged embrace of the mountains.  Abandoning both driver and jeep, I lace up my boots and pressed on by foot further into the Andes.  The air thins further, the sun dips low, painting the peaks in hues of amber and rose.  With lungs burning, I paused to debate pitching camp when a sound caught my ear.  A glow flickered ahead, pulsing from a cave’s mouth like a beacon.

I approached, heart pounding, and crouched behind a boulder.  Inside, a shaman presided over a ritual older than the stones themselves, harnessing the primal energy of this high-altitude crucible.  The air hummed with mist and mystery.  My foot shifted, a pebble betrays me, and the cave held its breath.  Before I could blink, the shaman stood before me, his eyes piercing yet curious, as if he’s seen a thousand wanderers but none quite like me.  The altitude, the cold, the otherworldly aura, it was all a bit like stepping into a dream woven from alpaca wool and starlight.

I stammered an explanation, my words slow in the thin air, but he only smiled, a smile that knows more than it tells.  He offered me a spoonful of something ethereal, a substance not made but born, clouds spun into silk, held in a simple jar.  The scent is a paradox: fresh as a mountain breeze, sweet as a lover’s promise.  With a nod, he urged me to taste.  It was a flavor so divine it could only be described as impossible.  Sweet, creamy, unparalleled, it danced on the tongue like a waltz at 13,000 feet.

The shaman gestured to a corner of the cave, where a lone tree, improbably thriving, wept this celestial cream.  Here, where cold air meets dense clouds and fine mist, the elements conspire with some ancient energy crystallizing into edible dream.  This was the final piece, the missing note in a symphony of flavor, destined to marry the rich chocolate I’d sourced from elsewhere.

And that is how, my friend, I came to possess the final ingredient.  Paired with the richest chocolate from my travels, it created what you now know as ATMOSPHERE’s Cloud 9 Cookies.  A confection so light, so divine, it’s as if the heavens themselves baked it.  Available at our Downtown Chattanooga coffeeshop or online at hiATMOSPHERE.com.