Advertisement
Published: June 22nd 2011
The two and a half day to ride to La Paz from Oruro was pretty uneventful. The first night we stayed in a residential (a really basic hostel with just a bed to sleep in) and the second night we had a bit of luck and managed to stay with a Bolivian family in their spare room for 30 bolivianos (just under 3 pounds) for both of us. The last bit of the ride to La Paz is a gentle climb to reach the top of the mountains that surround La Paz before a steep descent into the city centre. The city is built in a bowl shape, with the centre and richer parts being in the lowest part of the bowl and the poorer residential bits built in the steep hill sides. We had an awesome view when we reached the top of the bowl, with the whole city laid out before us. The traffic is petty mental in La Paz though so it made an interesting ride to get to the hostel!
We decided to stay a few days in La Paz to see the sights and recover a bit. We spent our first day looking round the
markets and the Coca museum and buying Alpaca jumpers to keep us warm when we camp! The next day we did the "worlds most dangerous road" mountain bike trip, where you descent from about 4700m - 1200m over 62km of winding road, with a 600m sheer drop on your left hand side! It's famous for the amount of people that have died on it from falling over the edge, although since a new road was build in 2006 their isn't much traffic on it anymore so the death toll has fallen dramatically. We descended from chilly mountain tops to a jungle like backdrop in about 2 hours of riding, where you barely have to pedal.
On the Saturday there was a massive festival in La Paz, where loads of roads were shut for a big procession which lasted the whole day. The whole city was out watching it so was quite a good atmosphere. On our final day we went to the cholitas wrestling which was pretty funny, basically a really bad bolivian version of wwf! The next stop is Copacobana, only about 150km from La Paz and lies on Lake Titicaca.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.076s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 9; qc: 61; dbt: 0.0533s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
