Rio to New York in 6 Months

We are now in La Paz which is the highest capital city in the world (4500 metres ASL). We had heard a lot of things about La Paz before we got here and not all of them were good. We have been pleasantly surprised as La Paz is a really nice city with a lot of character.Before I start writing about La Paz I have to tell you about the bus journey we took to get here (these bad bus journey stories are starting to become a bit too regular !!).

We booked the bus and arrived at the station in plenty of time for the 6.00pm departure so we decided to wait on the platform. This is always a good idea as you get lots of people coming up to you offering you all sorts of different kinds of foods and drinks.

Anyway, it got to about 5.45 and it started raining really hard and it continued for the rest of the night. The bus did not arrive at the platform until 7pm and by this time the roads were pretty badly flooded.

Just to give you a bit of background. There are two roads that go from Santa Cruz to La Paz. There is a new road that was built pretty recently and an old road that goes into the mountains. We had heard a rumour that the new road was unpassable and our suspicions were realised when we started going up and up into the mountains while the rain kept falling. It got to about midnight and the bus pulled over behind a queue of about 20 lorries. We were told that there had been a landslide and we were stuck for a while. To make matters worse there was no toilet on the bus again so I had to go outside in the dark and take a piss in the stream of water that was flowing down the side of the road while all the truck drivers watched in amusement.

We eventually started moving again at about 8am. By midday we were starting to feel quite hungry so we were quite excited when the driver stopped the bus for food. We got out of the bus and saw lots of people crowded around this woman who was stood in front of this giant wok. We went over to take a look at what culinary delights were on offer and watched as the lady used her greasy hands to cut bits of meat from the cooked heads of various animals. Alongside the animal heads were potatoes and what looked like cut up bits of vain and artery. There were also quite a lot of flies in and around the mixture.

I am not a fussy eater by any stretch of the imagination (I have been an avid follower of the “Three Second Rule” for many years) but I decided I would give the heads and vains a miss. We got back on the bus feeling even more hungry. We thought that the trip couldn´t get any worse but we were wrong again. Just after we started moving the driver decided to end the previous 15 hours of musical silence by playing a tape of movie theme tunes in Spanish. It wouldn´t have been so bad if the tape player had worked properly but the pitch of the music kept going up and down. After about an hour we realised that the driver only had the one tape and it kept repeating for the next few hours.

I recorded an excerpt of “Take My Breath Away” in Spanish onto our dictaphone so we could listen to it again later. When I get back I will let you all listen !!.

Anyway, this post has gone on for way too long. We eventually arrived in La Paz at 10pm after a 27 hour journey and made our way to a hotel.

Thats it.

James

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 1:45 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.