La Paz - This time I'm really not staying long

---

While backpacking, it’s rare to visit a place more than once. You are almost constantly on the move. So returning to La Paz after my foray into the jungle felt a little like coming home. Places and faces were familiar, a feeling usually unknown! With the two lovely Danes, I checked into Wild Rover hostel and settled quickly back into the whirlwind of La Paz life. I spent the following days enjoying copious white Russians, giggles and hungover shopping with my two gorgeous friends. I spent a night dancing cheesily with Shaz and Charlie, some friends from England I made on the jungle tour and bumped into randomly at the hostel. And one day, ignoring my parent’s voices in my head, I rode Death Road. Someone decided that it would be a good idea to put tourists on mountain bikes and send them off down a narrow unpaved road carved out of the side of impossibly high mountains. It is deemed the World’s Most Dangerous Road or affectionately, Death Road.
It was terrifying, exhilarating, beautiful and painful (I fell off right at the start, but persevered despite my grazed hand and shaken nerves). It is foggy and impossibly steep, the edges just dropping sharply down into oblivion. But the views over this forbidding mountain range (when you dare to take your eyes off the road), the glances into fecund valleys of tropical forest, are like no other. The drive back up in the minivan was far more terrifying, being able to concentrate on the all too close edge.

My second visit to La Paz had been just as debaucherous, surreal and exhausting, so I invested too many Bolivianos in a full cama (a seat that goes all the way down) bus to Sucre for some much needed quiet time.
Sucre was beautiful and relaxing. I spent most time sleeping and indulging in my first private room for a long time, but also managed to explore the city. I mostly traipsed slowly through the bustling streets, winding in between the beautiful pure white colonial buildings. I revelled in the joys of a classic South American food market, the piles of fresh pungent fruit, the bright stacks of vegetables, raw meat, bulging sacks of rice and pasta and the pushy but jolly female vendors in blue aprons. I thought I was in heaven when I bought two impossibly sweet mangoes for 2 Bolivianos (about 30 cents) and sucked the sweet skin the whole way home. Sucre was a much needed sabbatical after the extreme pace of La Paz and I felt myself finally relax.

---