La Paz

---

Saturday - Arrival at La Paz

So, we quickly found a taxi and crossed to the touristy bit of La Paz to find a hostal we'd been recommended - El Solario on Murillo and Santa Cruz. Basic, but with in-house internet (on which I am writing now) and only 50Bs - about 3pounds20 a night, we thought it was a good base.
A very nice coincidence was to bump into two people we'd met along the way, Dominic and Catherine - two friends travelling together before getting jobs.
Dominic wanted to book onto the trip up Huayna Potosi too so we found a good agency and signed up to leave on Monday morning for the 3-day trip which included an afternoon of training on a glacier using the equipment - namely crampons (metal spikes for walking on ice) and ice axes - for climbing steep ice.

We visited the Coca museum that afternoon and here are some interesting facts I picked up:


*Coca is a sacred plant to the locals - seeing as it has such amazing nutritious value and such great properties you can see why. It's a pity the UN see it as evil.
*Coca cola still uses the Coca plant for producing the drink - they buy something like 200 tons of the stuff each year.
*There are only a few countries in the world legally allowed to make cocaine - none of them being countries that actually produce coca. You guessed it, the USA, UK, France and Germany are in the top 10 'legal' producers - making tons each year. I'm sure all of it goes for medicinal purpose.
*Coca indirectly fuelled Spain in the 16th to 19th centuries - powering the slave labour sanctioned by the Catholic Church, keeping going the thousands of indigenous slave workers in mines like Potosi as their only decent source of nutrition for their 48hour work shifts.
*Many other interesting things....


Sunday

Mainly shopping for things we needed for the climb up Huayna Potosi.

The next three days are covered in the Huayna Potosi entry...

Thursday & Friday

Shopping and Weblog updating

The next five days are covered in the Rurrenabaque entry...

Wednesday night

Our flight back from Rurrenabaque was lovely (we watched a beautiful sunset), despite being driven demented by mosquito bites. On getting back to La Paz we decided to treat ourselves to some luxery after the jungle and pampas. We checked into a 5 start hotel - El Presidente. It was great, for the price of a B&B in England, we had a suite to ourselves! This consisted of a living room, bedroom and two bathrooms (one with a jaccuzi). We had a great view from our room, we could see a political rally in Plaza San Franciscofrom the window when we checked in. The hotel also had a great buffet breakfast and leisure center, it was damn hard to leave the next day....

Thursday

Thursday was spent sorting ourselves out, getting some clean clothes and other general maintenance stuff.

---