The highest Capital city in the world.... La Paz!

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So as I’m sitting outside my lovely Cabana in Uruguay with the sun blazing it seems like a good time to write this blog that Mike has been nagging me about for weeks!! We are obviously a little behind and I suppose this is partly my fault but not entirely am I to blame!!

We left off on the last blog that we was just leaving Copacabana for La Paz. The journey to La Paz was pretty uneventful, but would be the first of many smelly, dirty uncomfortable buses that we would take in Bolivia. We did however manage to make a couple of Bob’s (Bolivianos, Bolivia’s currency) on the way from the ‘hand’ at the water crossing kiosk so it wasn’t all bad. To be fair we did try to give him the money back but he was insistent the money was ours so what can you do??

We arrived in La Paz around 5pm’ish and it was pretty mental I think we must have sat in the taxi waiting to get out of the terminal for at least 15 mins, luckily we had agreed on a price and it wasn’t metered!! Our first impressions of La Paz was that this was going to be a crazy city, the traffic was manic and the pedestrians were almost as bad.

We arrived at our hostel just as the heavens opened and it didn’t stop all night. We headed to the nearest place for food and was rewarded with average food at an extortionate price, not great but at least we didn’t get too wet!

The next morning we met up with our friend Helen from the Inca trail and her friend Troy who she had met in Puno. We all wanted to do the world’s most dangerous road bike ride and we all fancied a trip to the amazon so after a very costly afternoon both trips were booked and our next week was all planned.

We spent the next couple of days just wandering around the city and taking it all in. We visited the main square, way too many pigeon’s for my liking, and the witches market, not as weird or interesting as we was expecting, and we also took a walk to see the famous San Pedro prison, where you used to be able to able to visit. We heard mixed stories as to whether you could still actually enter but we weren’t really up for it even if you could. It’s very strange though to see, as the prison, with the armed guards outside, is on a very nice plaza where people are going about their normal daily activities. We was just about to walk past the front entrance to the prison when a guy stopped us and told us he was a prisoner just released the day before and that they don’t like gringos walking in front of the prison or taking photos. He also told us that people would offer us tours of the prison but they would only steal our money. So we thanked this friendly convict and was on our way wondering why, if he had just been released, he was hanging around the place that had imprisoned him for however many years??? Who knows…..

La Paz also offered us the opportunity to indulge in a very yummy curry that we, well mainly Mike, had been craving for a while, for anyone else that fancies a curry whilst in La Paz the name of the restaurant was the Star of India. The food in La Paz had been a little hit and miss whilst we was there, some very overpriced some very reasonable and some that even came with a free hair rolled around the kebab…..nice!!!!

To be honest we didn’t really spend a lot of time in La Paz and probably not enough to do it justice but like we have said previously we didn’t really want to hang around in the big cities for very long so we just dipped our toes in.

The third day was finally upon us and after a very nervous sleep, well not really, we was up for the world’s most dangerous road, bring it on….

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