La Paz

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Blog 6 La Paz

We travelled to La Paz by bus from Lake Titicaca, a relatively short bus ride of around 4 hours. As we drove towards La Paz across the vast Altiplano, we had a spectacular view of the Cordillera Real and the high snowy peaks marching off into the distance. As we neared La Paz, we began to see a huge sprawling city, spread for what looked like miles across the high plains. (Fortunately) this is not actually La Paz, but a second city, El Alto, (with a population of 2 million, twice that of La Paz) which has grown up in the last 15-20 years and spreads for literally miles across the plains and ‘spills’ over the edge of the canyon down towards the main city of La Paz.

La Paz is an impressive sight, at 3,800 metres above sea level, deep in the valley, with snowy peaks at either end of the valley - Huayna Potosi at one end and Illimani at the other end. It seems that we’ve been at altitude for most of our time away so far, so another city at 3,800 didn’t really bother us, but you do find that walking up steep streets has to be done slowly.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office say that the political situation in Bolivia “is tense”, there are likely to be demonstrations and political protests. It seems that relations between Bolivia and UK/ USA are not particularly good, but we suspect this is probably something to do with the governing party’s friendly relations with Cuba and Venezuela. We also discovered on arriving in La Paz that the countrys national general election is to be held on 6th December. We seem to have a habit of arriving in countries in the middle of their general election campaigns - we did the same in India earlier in the year! Therefore necessary to keep our heads low and avoid demonstrations!

First impressions of La Paz were that it is a very built up, polluted, dark and dirty city. Not somewhere we fancied spending much time. However, La Paz was supposed to be more of an admin break - time to get online, download photos, plan our next adventures and do the laundry!

One important task to be done in La Paz was to find the post office and post a few things home which are now surplus to requirements - Lonely Planet guides to Ecuador and Peru, a couple of books and a random cushion cover which Sarah felt obliged to buy from the nice people on the reed islands of Titicaca.

Having found the post office and established that surface mail was the best and cheapest option, we then had to figure out how to get the package actually mailed. The ladies in the parcel office barked out instructions, threatening us with scissors (!) and demanded numerous forms to be filled in down to the nth detail - all in Spanish, so with a lot of guesswork on our part. By the time we had bought the box, had it wrapped in sacking and they had added other bits of packing material, the box weighed twice what it did when it started! It then turned out that the box needed to be taped and they didn’t have any tape - actually they had plenty, but apparently not for tourists. So Steve went off to buy a whole reel of tape, the box was taped and then the parcel lady proceeded to use our roll of tape for other parcels! The cheek of it! When Steve pointed this out, he had the tape unceremoniously flung back at him. There were a number of other travellers in the office also trying to figure out the process so it became a case of Gringos against the buearacracy and we left after approximately an hour, donating the tape to other gringos in need.

We were due to spend 4 days in La Paz and then fly out to the jungle to visit an ecolodge. On the Sunday morning we were due to fly, we got up early and checked out of our hotel, took a taxi to the airport, only to find that no planes were able to fly that day because it was raining in the jungle and the plane was unable to land on the grass runway. We took a taxi back into town, via the sights of El Alto (the second city) and avoiding the usual Sunday political demonstrations.

We were unable to fly again on the Monday, due to rain in the jungle, so another day hanging around in La Paz added to our frustrations. However, we did find a nicer area of town, where all the embassies are and the expats live… cleaner and calmer than the central touristy area. We even found a great Japanese restaurant!

Finally on the Tuesday we were able to fly out to Rurrenabaque in the jungle. However, this wasn’t our last time in La Paz - we returned again after our trip to the jungle; having found that it was virtually impossible to fly directly from the jungle to Santa Cruz - the economic capital of the country. And then we had to return again in order to fly out of the country to Argentina at the end of our time in Bolivia. Definitely our last trip to La Paz!

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