Copacabana/La Paz, Bolivia

Friday, December 31, 2004:

Laura and I ate breakfast at Hotel Utama and made it down to the park where the buses depart by 9 AM. We checked with several large companies, but their buses would not leave for La Paz for at least another hour. However, shared mini-bus collectivos were running regularly. We found one that was nearly full but relatively spacious (far roomier than the one we had stuffed ourselves into on the ride from Puno to the Peru/Bolivian border) and piled in. The price was $2.50.

The first hour of our trip took us along the mountainous shores of Lake Titicaca, the blue color growing more intense with each minute as the sunlight grew stronger. Eventually, you could make out reflections of the clouds and mountains on its calm, brilliant surface. We passed farms and tiny villages along a curving road that rose and fell and twisted with the contours of the land.

After an hour, we reached a small town on the edge of the lake. Another small town faced it several hundred feet across the water. We pulled up in front of a store and the Bolivians in the van (everybody but us) piled out. I assumed it was a bathroom stop, but, in fact, we had to get out so that they could move the van onto a barge across the lake while we took a separate passenger boat.
The barges were little more than large wooden rectangles with raised sides and reinforced (with more wood) bottoms. Large double-decker buses were being moved across this way, several at a time moving in each direction. In this regard, the traffic in the town and on the lake was heavy.

We resumed our trip on the other side. With the lake on our right and the mountains and stark, dusty plains of the Altiplano on our left, the landscape was stunning. The sky was a pure, cold blue and the clouds were voluminous pale-white plumes stretching in every direction. We passed more farms and sleepy towns as we went, including seemingly endless fields of cattle and sheep. Parts of the terrain resembled depictions of the American "Wild West," with low-growing green and yellow shrubs, plenty of red-brown dirt and wide open plains.

Finally, we began to encounter signs of urban life. The traffic grew thicker and we began to pass a series of poor and unkempt buildings, many missing windows and doors (and walls). Several men were stripping the last salvagable pieces of a skeletal wreck of a bus and trying to fit them onto an adjacent skeletal wreck of a bus. After a few miles, traffic ground to a halt while we passed a series of police and military roadblocks that were presumably searching for suspicious vehicles and/or persons entering the city.

The poor, crowded area we were driving through was El Alto, which is by some sources the fastest growing urban area in South America. It used to be considered a suburb of La Paz but is now its own separate "city." It attracts thousands of rural workers looking for better prospects, but its a destitute, depressing place that often resembles little more than a heap of ruins. That said, I saw one well-dressed young Bolivian couple wandering through the rubble holding hands, smiling and pushing a baby in a stroller. They could not have looked happier.

La Paz appears suddenly from the edge of El Alto. It is a sprawling maze of buildings lining a circular, 5-kilometer valley ringed by the ledges on which El Alto sits. Simply imagine a massive bowl: La Paz take up all of the space in the bowl (both at the bottom and along the sides), while El Alto sits bleakly on the lip. Its an awe-inspiring site to see the slums of El Alto abruptly come to a halt and witness a two-million person city stretched out over 1000 feet beneath you and for miles around. (The citizens of La Paz --- as with Bolivia itself --- are generally very poor, but the city as a whole appears to be much, much wealthier than El Alto.)

We reached a seedy-looking bus terminal and caught a taxi to Hostal Dinastia, which we picked out of Lonely Planet. The streets of La Paz were jammed with street-stahl markets and wandering vendors. Bottles of liquor and sparkling white wine were everywhere, people stocking up on them left and right. The driver could barely move the car at certain times because too many people were wandering through the streets, disregarding the street lights and cars.

Hostal Dinastia was described as a nice place in Lonely Planet, but wasn´t that nice at all. Single rooms without windows held small, creaky beds and a nightstand, nothing more. At least the management was friendly. Tired out and unwilling to navigate the crowds in the street with our backpacks on, we decided to deal stay put for the night. The rate for each room was only $3.00 anyway.

This wasn´t the only sign that La Paz would be soft on our wallets. We wandered out into town to find lunch and wound up at a bustling locals-only (except us) establishment where a plate of breaded steak or chicken with rice, fries and salad cost approximately 85 cents per plate. It wasn´t a small portion, either.

After the meal, we spent a few hours wandering along the busy La Paz streets. Everybody was getting geared up for New Years, purchasing wine and alcohol and --- consistent with Bolivian custom --- wads of fake money (apparently, it is traditional to eat 12 grapes and count wads of money for the New Year, though I unfortunately cannot explain the story behind this). The market in front of the 16th century Church of San Francisco was mobbed. Vendors were selling books, batteries, bread, CDs, cakes, radios, haircare products, the works.

We wandered through the "Witches´ Market" near our hotel for a while. The smell of herbs was overwhelming. The old women who ran the various stahls wore traditional multi-colored clothing and wide-brimmed hats. They sat quietly by their stands, which were stuffed with exotic plants and (brace yourself if you didn´t expect to hear this) bundles of shriveled-up llama fetuses. Gruesome little corpses, they are supposed to drive away evil spirits and cure illnesses. I have heard that you are supposed to bury them under your house to "give back to the earth" what has been taken from it, although I do not know if there are other uses for the fetuses as well.

That night we tried to find a Japanese restaurant listed in Lonely Planet, but the map we had seemed to be off. We asked a man on the street if the map was right. He pointed to a Japanese cultural center that appeared to be closed. "Knock," he told us, but we thought it looked a little strange to bang on the door to a closed cultural center to enquire about a restaurant that certainly wasn´t going out of its way to advertise its existence (no sign of any sort for it).

We tried to find a Viennese restaurant that Lonely Planet listed as being nearby. It was nowhere to be found. We wandered. And wandered. Eventually, we found a greasy Chinese restaurant. I am sorry to say the Chinese food in La Paz does not match the Chinese food in Lima. What we had was edible but not very good.

We celebrated New Years with a horde of other traveling gringos at a large bar/restaurant called "Mongos Rock Bottom Bar/Cafe." It was not a shabby place. Most drinks cost about $2.00, which is great, but it was hard to move around with so many people in the place. Laura and I ran into a couple of guys we had met on the Free Enterprise boat trip in the Galapagos more than a month before and I also saw a few people I had been scuba diving with while there. We spent a while talking with an amusing British couple and managed to survive until about 2 AM before going back to the hostal. (Of course, I wandered around for an hour after that to find food --- which I managed at a nice 24-hour diner/coffee shop. This and other aspects of the city impressed me and I was starting to wonder if a week or more in La Paz wouldn´t be a bad idea, the abundance of llama fetuses in street markets notwithstanding.)