DAY 80: Still feeling sick, I just slept in my hostel dorm bed all morning to recuperate. Joel the Australian chemistry student probably thought I was lame because instead of staying a couple more days to hang out like we were planning, he decided to ditch me and the city of La Paz and head south with a bus ticket.

By early afternoon, I was feeling better and, determined not to have a Blog entry with just a picture of me sleeping all day, I decided to wander around town. Walking passed the Plaza San Francisco with its Iglesia de San Francisco, I made my way through La Paz's busy, metropolitan streets down the main Avenida Mariscal Santa Cruz, which turned into the Plaza Venezuela, which fed into the Plaza del Estudiante. It was quite a way and my sore throat had come back with all the exertion. All I craved for was some Chinese soup again.

Since I couldn't find a Chinese place in my hostel's neighborhood the night before, I was determined to find one this day in the more cosmopolitan area of the city. Using the Lonely Planet guide, I walked passed all the roasted chicken stands, passed the Burger King and the In-N-Out Burger, to a point on the map where there was supposed to be a Chinese food restaurant. However, when I got there, it had already been transformed to a Mac-user graphic design shop (the Lonely Planet book is about three years outdated) and the only other Chinese food place I found nearby was closed. So I went wandering around some more -- surely I was bound to run into one.

LA PAZ IS SITUATED IN A CANYON, with the main road running across the bottom of the chasm. This means that whenever you want to go somewhere other than the main road, you have no choice but to go uphill. In fact, walking to anywhere in La Paz involves going uphill -- what goes down, must go back up if you're doing a roundtrip -- and with the thin air at almost 12,000 ft. ASL, going uphill all the time isn't such a hot idea when your lungs have a cold.

I wandered around, walking up and down streets and stair plazas, my heart pumping faster than normal to supply oxygen to my brain. My only mission was to find a Chinese food place and for hours I had no luck. I was about to give up on Chinese food to settle on some caldo de pollo -- until Jackie Chan came to the rescue.

BY "JACKIE CHAN" I don't mean the martial arts star that does his own stunts, the one that may or may not "understand the words coming out of [Chris Tucker's] mouth" in Rush Hour. By "Jackie Chan" I mean some other random Chinese guy with a restaurant in La Paz. A spicy hot and sour soup did my sinuses good, while three cups of hot Chinese tea soothed my throat -- not to mention making me take a really long whiz.

With the help of "Jackie Chan", I was a new man again and continued to wander the city.

"HEY!" I CALLED, waving my hand to the Danish family when I noticed the four of them walking down the main strip at the bottom of the canyon. We chatted for a bit about what we had seen in La Paz so far, and Elizabeth and I agreed that La Paz was nothing like we expected. Perhaps due to the raised expectations spawned from the raves from other travelers and Lonely Planet, we agreed it was "just another big city." Usually I appreciate big cities as much as I do natural destinations, as long as they emit a unique pulse or vibe. Perhaps I felt no vibe because I only felt sick for most of the time.

I parted ways with the Danish family again and wandered around the streets with handicraft shops and the markets that sold everything from chicken to chicken wire. I walked across the chasm and up the hill to the Plaza Pedro Murillo, surrounded by Bolivian government buildings, the cathedral and a busy pedestrian mall. The neighborhood around the plaza was a lot more livelier and traveler-friendly than the one my hostel was in, and so I made a reservation at a different hostel nearby -- conveniently across the street from a Chinese food restaurant.

SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF POETIC JUSTICE, I plopped a buck down and bought a bootleg Jackie Chan movie from one of the market stands in the Plaza Perez Velasco (picture above) since a bootleg Jackie Chan restaurant helped me earlier in the day. After having a caldo de pollo, I planned to just rest up in my room with a couple of movies on my laptop. However when I got there, I didn't have the room to myself like I thought I would. Joel had been replaced by Bill, an Aussie girl from outside of Sydney in her tenth month of traveling around the world, and in the third bed was Chris from the UK, in his third month of traveling. I chatted with the two as they settled into the room, keeping my laptop away.

Jackie Chan on VCD would have to wait. Rather than having a martial arts star kick around on my laptop screen, I took some antibiotics that kicked into my body and put me to sleep.