La Paz: a big bowl with lots of bowler hats

---

I spent four days in La Paz, Bolivia after taking an overnight bus from Uyuni that had to be the worse bus ride of my life, and I have had a couple in my short lifetime.😊 We were literally bouncing out of our seats for the first 6hrs of the 12hr trip. A bruised tail bone was my gift from that ride.

Arriving in La Paz you realize it is built on the side of a mountain that forms a large bowl with the city centre at the bottom. At over 3,700m it is pretty high up! It is a bustling city that at its centre is one big street market where you can buy anything. One highlight is roaming through the markets (even if you are not a shopper), including the Witch's Market were you can buy all the ingredients you need to solve the world's problems. The featured ingredient is Lama fetuses. That's right, Lama fetuses hang in every shop door in the Witch's Market.

What do you see? Bolivian ladies dressed in their traditional dresses and bowler hats (They all look so cute. 😊); cool old buses that are colorfully decorated; constant flow of minivan taxis with people hanging out the window shouting out where the taxi is going; people hanging out in plazas; and young kids on every corner shing shoes (they love getting their shoes shined I guess). I also noticed that people love their ice cream and pastries too (something we have in common).

Bolilvia is a third world country and one of the poorest in South America. You can see and smell that as you get out of the dowtown centre. No matter what third world country you are in it seems poverty looks the same from the buildings, to the garbage, to the kids who have to work at young ages to feed themselves.

The last day I took a tour of Tiahuanaco, an archaeological site that, although does not look at all like it originally did (the Spanish destroyed all most all of it looking for gold and erasing what they thought was the devil's temple), still had some impressive sights. It is a large complex about 10kms away from Lake Titicaca. It was built by an extremely technologically advanced pre-Inca society who is believed to have been around for 28 centuries and disappeared around 1,200 A.D. Besides the large stone statues, there was a sunken courtyard that had over 170 stone faces coming out of the stone walls. The faces looked like people from other races and some looked like out of this world. That is a sight that will make you go "hhhmmm". What is amazing about this site is the incredible size of the stones used, the precision of how the stones were cut, there weight, and the fact that some of these stones are so hard that today only diamonds could be used to cut them. The stones were so finely cut and interlocked together that they did not use mortar.When you are talking stone blocks that weigh 10, 20, 100 ton, it is another "hhhmmm" moment.

I finished off my last night eating at La Belle Vista, 16 floors atop the Presidente's Hotel. It was suppose to have the best views in the city. Although the food wasn't great the views were.

La Paz, all in all, was a nice little stop before the home stretch to my adventure's end. So a tip of the hat (bowler hat that is) to La Paz!

---

Photos

A tale of two worlds
Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. But you do see the contrasts with wealth at times. here is a good example.

Iglesia de San Francisco
The sky turned very ominous looking

Tiahuanaco
The structures at Tiahuanaco were built by a very sophisticated pre Inca socirty that is believed to have been around for 28 centuries until about A.D. 1200.

Semi-subtranean temple
You can see some of the over 170 the sculpted heads and teh monlithes of the Semi-subtranean temple.

Stone faces inside the Kalassaya
Very stranges stone faces inside the semi-Underground Temple, the Kalassaya.

Sun Gate at Tiahuanaco
Carved out of one large 10 ton stone. The intracacy is quite imazing.

Monolithe
One of two monolithes at the site

Do you see the cross on his arm?
The Spanish carved crosses on many of the stone carvings to exercise them.

Puma Punku
This ia a site just across the road from Tiahuanaco. The stones in Puma Punku are made up of granite, and diorite, and the only stone that is harder that those two, is the diamond. If the people who built this place cut these stones using stone cutting techniques, then they would had to have used diamond tools. If they didn't use diamonds to cut these stones, then what did they use? Oh I forgot to mention that the heaviest stone weighs 131 tons and is believed to have been transported from 10km away.