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Published: February 9th 2013
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I'm currently in the World's highest capital city, La Paz, nestled in a bowl surrounded by snowcapped mountains at 3650 meters its a somewhat crazy place. Someone in Cuzco that I met described it as a city with no rules which I think in many ways is a fair description. The traffic here is insane, there seems to be some kind of outside celebration every 100 yards, the streets are constantly full of people and half the central streets seem to be markets selling all kinds of things. Generally the place just has a real buzz about it.
My first full day here I tried to tick as many of the tourist boxes as I could. I started by visiting the museums on Calle Jaen (a famous old road here), before taking a look at the various famous Plazas and the Presidential palace. There's a ludicrously cheap single ticket to all the museums so even though there were some random ones (a museum of minerals & metals and a museum dedicated solely to the coastal war between Chile and Bolivia) you go and have a look anyway. No visit to La Paz would be complete without seeing San
Pedro prison. From the outside it seems like quite a plain if somewhat intimidating building with high walls, gates and guard towers – a typical prison I hear you say. On the inside however all manner of craziness prevails (typical for here really). The prison is a society, economy and legal system in its own right with prisoners renting accommodation, earning incomes and often having their families reside with them. Tours used to be unofficially available from inmates with tourists encouraged to buy various Bolivian 'products', however these apparently ceased a while ago. Apparently there even used to be a hotel according to Wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Pedro_prison As a mountain biking enthusiast no trip to Bolivia would be complete without trying out some of the trails around La Paz which annually hosts the Red Bull descenso del condor Extreme Downhill event. It was looking like I might have to cycle the famous death road (entertaining, but about as technical as Etch a sketch) to get some mountain biking in due to it being low season at the moment. Fortunately however I found
Pro Downhill on Calle Sagarnaga who provided a day's riding in the mountains with all the kit
which included blazing along part of the famous red bull course. Despite the trails being in a state of disrepair in places due to landslides I can easily say this is the best mountain biking I've done. The views were incredible, the drops and jumps were great and generally the trails flowed very freely with not a tree root in sight (plenty of rocks though). Whilst up there we also had the pleasure of bumping into the Bolivian national downhill champion Yannick Wende who blazed past me at some speed at one point when I took a slight detour and ended up over the handle bars in a cactus-like bush. Overall a great day out with lots of video footage and photos provided by Pro Downhill to take away. Below is a video of one of my morning runs using a chest mounted go pro and also a video of the insane red bull trail route (I think you can work out which is which....).
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Tomorrow I'm up at 2.30am to get on a bus to Oruro for its famous Carnival which is
apparently one of the most impressive in South America. Given the low price and fine taste of Bolivian beer I think this could be an interesting day!
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