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Published: September 29th 2013
Good Afternoon, Folks! I´m very sorry that I have been so deficient at continuing this blog but it just seems like time has been slipping away more and more as we get closer and closer to our departure date of Oct. 17th!! We do have a little time today so I will try to catch up a little...
We are currently in Uyuni, which is midway down from La Paz towards the south of Bolivia. We arrived in La Paz on Sept. 24th, having successfully crossed the border from Puno to Copacabana on Lago Titicaca and continuing right on to La Paz. I say ¨successfully¨ because I had committed an oversight and had NOT upgraded Rumi´s passport to a new one as it is slated to expire in late February (they only give kids 5 years on their passport. Bolivia (and Peru, too, by the way) state that the passport has to be not expired for 6 months after you enter the country so we were afraid that Rumi (poor kid!) was going to be rejected while they let the parents in no problemo!! But, it turns out, Bolivia charges US citizens $135 each to enter the country (As far as I know, they don´t charge anyone else ANY money for entrance!!) so when our bus got got to the border and we flashed that $405 in hundreds, they didn´t notice the small irregularity with Rumi´s passport and here we are now, in Bolivia, and we didn´t have to leave our 11 year old at the border on Lago Titicaca to hang while his parents are out touring around Bolivia for 2 weeks!!
The bus approach to La Paz was beautiful!! Like Kathmandu, La Paz is located at the bottom of a bowl and that bottom is at 12K feet so I wonder what the top of the bowl is! As we approached from the lake, the mountains of the Cordillera Real were rising to the left (up to 21K feet!!) and the road slowly circles the top of the bowl before descending in a wide spiral to the bottom. And, to add to the beauty, we ran straight into an afternoon storm, which has become de rigeur in our La Paz afternoons. This one was especially intense: very dark skies with hail/rain with the people on the crowded streets scattering as it came down...
Then the bus plopped us down straight in the middle of the ´gringo ghetto´, in front of the Diana office on Sagarnaga Street between the Artesian St. (Linares) and Illampa. I was expecting the Bus Terminal but we hauled our luggage accross the narrow street into a small cafe to let coffee and delicious postres assauge our pain as we figured out where the H we were!! Lisa had her heart set on Arthy´s Guesthouse, which was a little out of the immediate area but we hailed a taxi and we were in their 4 bed room in a jiffy! The book describes Arthy´s perfectly: an oasis! Nice rooms, a very nice kitchen (that we did not take advantage of) and a very warm and welcoming big room with 2 computers and an incredible choice of DVDs to choose from (we watched ¨Men Who Stare At Goats¨ one evening!!). The reception folks all speak English and they were very helpful in directing us to where we needed to go as we did our errands!! The only thing that I would change in the book is to change it from one ¨$¨ to ¨$$¨as there are definitely much cheaper places to stay in the ¨ghetto¨ but one definitely gets their money´s worth IF you want to spend the money (I think it was 85 Bolivianos per person per night).
I like La Paz!! Again, like Kathmandu, the food and non-food stalls that line the streets are incredible and the people are everywhere. We took the pedestrian walkway across Av. Montes and huffed and puffed our way up and down the cobblestoned streets. The Iglesia de San Francisco amazed me with the amount of gold that was on the alter!!! But most of our time was spent doing errands (visiting the Star Peru office in SE La Paz took 4 hours: 45 minutes to get to the area, then 2 hours to find the office and then visiting the ATM to make 5 withdrawals to pay for the tickets since they don´t accept credit cards!! (Whoever heard of an airline that doesn´t accept credit cards??)). I also went to the Train office which is a little south of the central area (about a 1/2 hour walk) but the ticket purchase was a breeze. I always like to take a train if that is an option and the train from Oruro to the Argentine border was definitely an attraction!
We ate out the 3 nights we were in La Paz. The second night we went to The Steakhouse, which turned out to be a disaster! We went on the advice of another blog on this site but on our particular night, it seemed our waitress was spaced out somewhere else and they didn´t have enough help to handle all the patrons (it was the waitress´s job to keep the salad bar up and she just never had time to do that so the salad bar was always empty) and something happened to our order so after an hour of not getting our food, we mentioned it to her (she hadn´t been to our table for 45 minutes after bringing our drinks!) and then it took another 45 minutes to get our food! We ordered ¨medium well¨for the steak and it was brought ¨very rare¨(still breathing!) and when she brought it back to the cook, we could see the cook question her like ¨you never told me they wanted it medium well, etc., etc. so, all in all, it was a total disaster! The food was pretty good when we eventually got it but it wasn´t worth the problems and time and waiting...
On our last night, we went to a Thai-Japanese-Indian restaurant that we forgot the name of (it was on Sagarnaga between Linares and Murillo opposite the church) that was very good. When we entered the restaurant down a long narrow hallway into a courtyard, the restaurant was playing the exact same Tibetan CD that they were playing endlessly in Ladakh in 2009 when we were there!! It was fate!! And the food and service was very good! We got 2 Thai dishes and one Indian and we were very satisfied!! I´m sorry we forgot the name of the restaurant.
So, after that, we returned to the guesthouse to get ready for the next morning, when we´d be leaving on a bus to Oruro so that we could catch the train to Uyuni!! We left our musical instruments and an entire bag of unnecessary stuff at the Guesthouse so we are currently traveling light!!
Good night, folks, and our leaving La Paz and getting to Uyuni will be the subject of our next blog!!!
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s braun
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Travel to Bolivia with Tuba City Friends
Enjoyed your first days in Bolivia. Your descriptions of the pleasures and the pains of travel sound very real. and they were!!