Looking for ways to get to Buenos Aires

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I checked into another hostel which didn’t have a club attached to it unlike the one I stayed in last night which played music from 1am to 5am. I got up with a positive attitude and went for a coffee in the local market where I met a guy called Santiago, a Bolivian, who told me that Bolivians don’t like Chileans because they charge their holiday makers a fortune to get near the coast. Like every latino does, ) he told me about there being lots of robbers in Buenos Aires and he also gave me the name of a travel agency to help get me out of La Paz . He’s guessed immediately that I’d been to Yungas (the area between Coroico and La Paz) recently as I had 15 red mosquito bites on my legs. He said ‘everybody who comes from Yungas looks like that. Mosquitos wait in Yungas until they find people whose blood is from colder climates and then bite them.’ It was true. When I'd looked around the square in Coroico all the tourists had been bitten.

I like the market a lot as I can get the freshest, home-cooked food for a really cheap price, it’s made quickly and I can see it being made there and then. In the market people always ask where I’m from as they don’t get many tourists there and they enjoy asking questions about the UK. I tend to meet Bolivians who want to travel themselves and are excited to hear about my trip. Now that I’ve been in La Paz on and off for nearly 2 weeks I’m getting into a routine of beginning the day with a coffee in the market chatting to locals and ending the day with a coffee in the market.

This morning I packed strategically determined that I wouldn’t have to pack for the rest of my trip in Buenos Aires. This took me about an hour and a half. I checked into another hostel and carried all my luggage over to there, I walked for a while to find a launderette, went to a watch repairer to get my watch strap fixed and went around numerous travel agencies looking for flights to Buenos Aires for Monday or Tuesday without much success. By about 6pm that was enough excitement for one day. Walking through the streets (every street in La Paz) full of vendors with stalls selling everything from 100 different types of bubble gum to every freshly squeezed tropical juice you can imagine, trying to cross roads avoiding the Dodge buses from 1950s America, waiting and waiting for a slight gap in the traffic, breathing in their and every other non-serviced car’s black smoke, climbing up and down hills (as all of La Paz is built on steep hills) fighting the lack of oxygen from the high altitude is both exciting but incredibly exhausting.

I went out again in the evening for my usual stroll, buying the odd freshly squeezed fruit juice or hot dog, watching a live play or comedy in the main square. I finally found a flight out of here at a reasonable price, which will take me to Salta. I booked it for first thing Tuesday morning. I will then get a bus from Salta to Buenos Aires. Unfortunately I will arrive in Buenos Aires a week later than I had hoped so I will have to pick up the pace as soon as I get there and avoid siestas. Or most likely I will have siestas anyway and I will visit Buenos Aires the next time I come to South America.

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