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Published: August 9th 2010
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When you first drive into
La Paz from the high roads looking down, it is an amazing site. This huge city is built at 4,000m above sea level on the side of a canyon and descends to 2,800m above sea level. What on earth were they thinking? The bus stops right outside our hotel (Rosario) which is at the high end of the city, near the witches market. Just leaving the hotel is an experience. Homeless people, rubbish, street sellers and dodgy looking shops all crowd the streets. A distinct lack of refridgeration and sanitation makes for a funky smell in the air!
The city tour was hardly the most exciting tour in the world, in fact it felt a little like the Kramer reality tour, just our guide making up places to go. We started in the south of town at Moon Valley, an amazing landscape of limestone that was eroded to look like the surface of the moon in parts. In most parts there are just towering pillars of limestone, one man was perched on one with his guitar entertaining tourists. It was a bit of respite from the traffic clogged inner city and we even saw some
military training on the way.
Our car then took us through the much nicer neighbourhoods and some very rich massive houses which must have been owned by drug lords. Then onto a morning snack of sultenas which were tasty - although the juice they came with tasted like dish water. From there we went to
Plaza Pedro de Murillo, the city centre, featuring the bullet riddled presidential palace which hasn’t been plugged due to protests from the family of the massacred who liken it to a monument of the violence that took place there. The plaza featured many people going about their day.
Gonzalo explains that 80%!o(MISSING)f Bolivians are self employed, meaning that they are doing whatever they can to make a buck. We see many scary looking ski mask clad show shiners which Gonzalo explains the mask is more to hide their identity as they are ashamed of their profession (many are uni students that are highly intelligent, although those ski masks can’t be good for tourist business!). The rich locals seem to love the shoe shiners though - surely it’s a power trip though - who really needs their shoes cleaned every day. We also
see a guy who is a walking telephone service, offering his mobile phone for you to make a call and then pay him for the service - unbelievable.
From the plaza we head to the original Spanish street, a pedestrian street with brilliant old Colonial buildings and a small museum which Gonzalo takes us through to explain what the Spanish brought to the country, it contains mostly Spanish woodwork and many catholic paintings. From there we drove past the
San Pedro prison, which is more like a housing estate it is so massive and Gonzalo explains to us that we need to read the Australian written book,
Marching Powder to find out how the prison works.
We wandered the markets near the San Francisco church. It was an exhausting walk up the steep streets and even more exhausting was the amount of junk and pirated stuff that was up for grabs on the street. We then head to our dinner and
Pena or folk dancing show and are impressed with the musicians and dancing. The first dance is a recreation of the
Oruro festival where neighbouring villages fight until one person dies and the other village is proclaimed
to have a good year of crops - crazy stuff! The 3 guys and 3 girls dancing are all very good - until the 3 girls grabbed guys out of the crowd to dance with them and I was cursing our front table position! She must have liked me though because I get another shot later in the evening for another dance which was more structured so I was better - at least I didn’t look as bad as the fat Czech guy! The final dance involved very scary outfits and the guys doing much more acrobatic work and fighting - the musicians were good but we weren’t going to buy any of their CDs in a hurry. We head back to the hotel at 11pm a little cautiously given our surrounds, and pass a few people passed out in the streets, one in a pile of his own vomit. Charming stuff! That's La Paz for you, a crazy city where every corner you turn you never know what you're gonna get.
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