We’d brought Diamox with us on our trip to use if we needed help dealing with altitude sickness. Since Erika had been pretty well bowled over by the altitude in Sucre, she was worried about going to the much higher elevation of La Paz. So the night before we left, she took a Diamox.

Big mistake, it turns out.

Erika woke up far more spacey and nauseated than when she wasn’t on the Diamox. Not great since we had a flight that morning!

She held it together really well for the long ride to the airport. Then she abandoned me. She ran to the bathroom and left me to check us in. Which, they totally let me check her in and drop off her bag, which was somewhat surprising. “¿Donde está el otro pasajero?” is all they asked, and “en el baño” was good enough for them.

The flight was short and uneventful (the best flights are), but was spectacular as you come in around the massive mountain Illimani. Illimani is a snow-capped beast, rising to a ridiculous 21,000 feet of elevation, and towering over the La Paz area. Even with the valley La Paz is in, you can see it from almost anywhere in the city, and it completely dominates the scenery as you fly into the airport.

The airport is actually in the city of El Alto, the sprawling, second-largest city of Bolivia, that spreads over the altiplano and looms over La Paz in the valley below. El Alto is at almost 14,000 feet of elevation, and it’s not uncommon for travelers, unaccustomed to such altitude, to arrive at the airport and pass out in baggage claim.

Fortunately, we’d had three days of acclimatization in Sucre, so we didn’t pass out, but Erika did still feel like garbage from the Diamox. We got our bags, found a cab, and began the terrifying vehicular plunge into La Paz.

Driving is intense in Latin America, period. I think I’ve convinced myself that I generally feel it’s safer than in the US, because drivers seem to be far more alert (to drive that aggressively, you have to be pretty alert, so you get one with the other). Nevertheless, it’s intense.

To me, La Paz was the worst we’d seen.

The city is terribly dense and overpopulated, the streets are narrow and cramped, and they are jammed with cars. Everyone drives with staggering aggression, and the cacophony of horns is deafening. On top of that, getting into the city from the airport requires a death-defying descent down the steep roads into the valley.

Our driver took to it with a La Pazian gusto, blaring his horn, passing on the side of on-coming traffic, pushing his car into taxi-sized gaps between other vehicles. His exploits were not unnoticed by other drivers.

“Pájaro!” I heard yelled nearby, seemingly in our direction. Bird? There must be something else to it. A quick Google search confirmed: it’s derogatory slang meaning either “homosexual” or “dick”, depending on the region it’s used in.

Our driver was kind of a dick, yeah.

Anyway, he got us to our AirBnb safely, we walked inside…

…and were greeted with the greatest AirBnb ever!

It was a beautiful 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo on the 18th floor with stunning views of the surrounding city, El Alto, and of course Illimani. It had wall-to-wall windows to provide those views. It had heat built into the floors. It was also in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, Sopocachi. And all this for $49 USD a night. Which, while somewhat expensive for Bolivia, was cheaper than most places we’d stayed during the trip. Plus, it was a 2 bed 2 bath 18th floor condo in Sopocachi!

This was a fantastic place to relax and spend time… which is good because we spent a lot of time in that apartment. Erika, still reeling from the Diamox and elevation, disappeared to bed and I didn’t really see her the rest of the day. I spent the day writing computer programs (I’m a nerd, I can’t be stopped). That evening, I went to the grocery store, got our weekly supplies as well as ingredients for dinner, and we cooked a wonderful vegetable stir-fry and watched Master of None on Netflix.

When people ask “How can you just travel for so long?”–this is how. Because we can still Netflix and chill some nights.

Floating Through La Paz

Erika was still very slowed the next day, so she slept in and we hung around the apartment all morning. In early afternoon, the stir-crazy had finally caught up enough that she felt up to getting outside.

“Let’s just go for a walk around our neighborhood,” she suggested, which sounded great to me.

We went out the building, down the hill, and past the grocery store, so she’d now seen just as much of the city as I had. We continued to an enormous traffic circle that was difficult to deal with as a pedestrian, on account of the crazy driving. As intense and aggressive as driving is, that translates directly to being a pedestrian too… I don’t think anywhere we went is worse for being a pedestrian than La Paz.

At any rate, we went around the circle, crossed over a beautiful bridge over a gaping canyon, and came across one of the teleférico–cable car–stations. A few years ago, a cable car based public transit system was built to connect La Paz with El Alto–a long-time infrastructure dream. Over the next couple of years, the system was expanded to criss cross all of La Paz, and they’ve been continuing to open new lines and stations up through today, with a few more lines still to open. The station we came across was on the línea blanca, a line that had just opened.

From where we stood, we could see the white line going down the hill–just one station below–and connecting to the sky-blue line, which we knew went out the valley toward the green line.

“Why don’t we ride the hill to the end of the white line, take the sky-blue line to the end and back, then walk back home?” Erika suggested. Sounded easy and fun, and just a couple stations to ride to, so should only be a few minutes.

I looked up the hill. “How about, we ride the white line up to the other end, then back down and do the sky-blue line?” I countered. Erika thought that sounded great. So we headed up to the station.

Two-and-a-half hours later, we’d ridden most of the city’s teleférico system and were back at our station in Sopocachi.

It turns out riding these was a blast, so when we got to the top-end of the white line and saw it connected to the orange line, we said “eh, why not?” When the end of the orange line connected to the red line, we jumped onto the red. And when the red line climbed the hills up to El Alto, and at the top connected to the blue line, we took the blue line too! It gave us amazing views of the city, a lovely self-guided tour, and was extremely cheap entertainment–we spent a grand total of like $7 USD.

Happy Birthday to Me

The next day was my birthday, and Erika had put together some excellent ideas for our day. We weren’t exactly seizing the day because Erika was still trying to feel better, and… well, we don’t do a lot of seizing. But when we did get up and got going, we had a busy rest of the day!

Our first stop after lunch was an early afternoon walking tour. As you can tell from previous blog entries, we do a lot of these, and usually one of the first things we do when we get to a big city is see if they have any free walking tours. This one that Erika found in La Paz turned out to be very good!

The tour began in Plaza San Pedro, next to the infamous San Pedro prison. The prison is like a little city inside a city, where inmates must pay rent for their cells, and the wealthier inmates have the nicer cells, which are basically comfortable houses. How do they make money to pay rent? By producing cocaine of course! Cocaine is made inside the prison, and the inmates come up with various ways of getting it out. Read more about the prison on Wikipedia; it’s fascinating stuff.

The tour continued through other areas of La Paz including a fruit and vegetable market, and the Witches Market. The Witches Market is run by various shamen and witch doctors, and sell many useful everyday potions for increasing luck, fertility, or, naturally, male potency. I’m sure these various potions are not at all the same thing. They also, rather creepily, sell llama fetuses, which you can find prominently hanging in the shop fronts. When constructing new buildings, it’s customary to bury a llama fetus in the foundation as an offering to Pachamama, Mother Earth to the native peoples of the Andes. The tour guides told us also of more sinister offerings: homeless men, who are dulled first with alcohol and lured to their sacrifice with promises of food. Be careful when going for a drunken bender in La Paz!

The guides finished our tour at a tavern where we sampled the Bolivian alcohol Singani, a wine derivative that is similar to a Brandy. They also gave us some real talk on politics in Bolivia, including some of the ridiculous ideas of their president. For instance, he noted that Bolivia is roughly the size of Germany, but with only a fraction of the population; we need more people, he insisted! Therefore, he wanted to outlaw condoms. Fortunately, betters in his government convinced him that was a bad idea, so he took another swing: fine all women over the age of 18 who don’t have children! Naturally, Bolivian women rebelled at this idea and it, too, died before ever becoming reality. Hearing of the ridiculous thoughts and ideas of their head of state, I felt a strong kinship with Bolivians.

Coffee

After the tour finished, we walked all the way back to our neighborhood of Sopocachi, to a coffee shop that Erika had found, Typica Café. Finding good coffee in South America had been a titanic struggle, so Erika had spent some time looking for good coffee in La Paz, and had found a well regarded place right in our own neighborhood. You wouldn’t think finding good coffee would be so difficult–after all, a lot of the best coffee in the world is grown in South America. Unfortunately, they export all their best stuff to Europe and the US, and most of what you can find in South American cities is just very, very bad.

Fortunately, the coffee at Typica Café was very good! Erika’s tea was another matter, and the search for a decent tea in South America would have to continue. We had a delicious, warm brownie as well, then went back to our apartment to get ready for dinner!

Rendezvous

To finish off my birthday, Erika suggested dinner at a Rendezvous, a restaurant just a block from our apartment. This became one of our favorite restaurants in town: the pasta dishes were superb, and the waiter was incredibly friendly. They also carried a very good German-style beer that was brewed in Santa Cruz!

Photo Safari

We were still feeling fairly slowed by the elevation the next day, and we didn’t get a lot of pictures during the walking tour, so for the next day we decided to just go back to some of the same spots and get some pictures. Rather than walk there, however, we used the teleféricos!

We jumped off at Plaza Riosinho, and started by walking down Calle Jaen, known for it’s colorful buildings and museums. From there, we wandered to Plaza Murillo, home to the Bolivian Presidential palace, and part of our tour the previous day. Today, the plaza was filled with pigeons, which made for fun, dramatic pictures.

We continued to the Mercado Lanza, and to Plaza San Francisco, with the beautiful Basílica de San Francisco.

And that was it! We knew we had more time in La Paz in a little less than a week, and we knew this first trip would be sluggish as we adjusted to the altitude, so we stayed pretty low key. It was getting later in the afternoon, and once the sun starts to dip behind the hills, La Paz gets chilly fast. So we walked quickly back home, before our short sleeve clothing choices started to become a liability.

What’s Next?

La Paz is a fascinating city, with vistas and a temperament unlike any place we’d been. We still wanted to spend more time there, and fortunately we’d be able to, after a few days break exploring some other regions of Bolivia. The next day, we had a very early morning flight down to the town of Uyuni, Bolivia, to explore the famous Bolivian salt flats. Come back then to check out the pictures of that ridiculous, fantastic landscape and read about our couple days there!