La Paz
I arrived in La Paz only expecting to spend a day or 2 there, as I normally don´t like big cities and from what I had heard from other travellers I wasn´t expecting to like it. But in the end I stayed about a week and really enjoyed it. Unlike most capital cities that could be anywhere in the world, La Paz is still very Bolivian. The day we arrived we went up to the market in El Alto. It was huge, every street we went down was full of stalls specialising in something different ranging from food to animals, cars, sewing machines, clothes, lizards for herbal remedies and anything else you could think of. In the afternoon we spent more time wandering around getting to know the city, visiting the main tourist areas such as the witches market where you can buy a lot of woven items and llama foetuses. In the evening we went to the worlds highest microbrewery for dinner and to try some of the beers, which were surprisingly good.
The next day we took a bus tour around the southern end of the city. First it went out into the rich suburbs, very different from anywhere else in Bolivia and then we went to the Valle de la Luna on the outskirts of the city. La Paz is in an amazing location for a capital city, built in a canyon at high altitude surrounded by even higher mountains. The Valle de la luna is a group of eroded canyons and pinnacles just outside the city, which was interesting to explore. In the afternoon we went to the Coca museum, which explained everything about the coca plant, from the history of when people started to chew it, the traditions and benefits associated with the use of coca leaves now and the conflicts caused between growing it for cocaine and just for using the leaves. It was a really interesting little museum but having tried chewing the leaves in several different forms, coca tea and alcoholic coca I still think it all tastes disgusting. That night was my last with Andy, Jodie, Peter and Sofia that I had been travelling with for a while so we went to a pena, a meal with traditional music played by a live band.
The next day was the Gran Poder festival, an annual event in La Paz. After a few too many glasses of wine the night before we were woken up at about 9am by the start of a parade. Our room in the hostel overlooked part of the parade route so we were able to watch some of the parade from there. Was reallyu interesting to see all the elaborate costumes of people in the parade and even a lot of the Bolivians watching hads obviously dressed up in their finest traditional dress for the occassion. Well for the first few hours it was interesting, then we realised how difficult it would actually be to even get out of the hostel let alone go anywhere or do anything and Jodie and Andy were trying to catch a bus out of the city that day. Eventually we found a way out, they went and caught a bus and I spent the day wandering round the city, occassionally watching bits of the parade, which went on and on and on. I think it eventually finished about 1.30am.
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