Update from La Paz, Bolivia

¿Como Esta, Chicos Y Chicas?

We’re in dusty La Paz, capital of Bolivia and the highest capital city in the World - 3600m above sea level. It’s set in a canyon, so there is one main, flat street with all the side streets heading steeply upwards away from it. It’s really hard work getting around - walking the steep streets at this altitude has you huffing and puffing in no time - but it’s also a very interesting city, full of lively people and colourful markets. Pick of the markets would have to be the witches market, where you can buy a dead llama foetus should your heart desire one (they bury them under new buildings and businesses for good luck).

Appalling bus journeys are something of a gringo right of passage here in South America. Whether its cross-eyed bus drivers or wheels about to fall off, each traveller has their own story. Our most recent bus journey lasted 18 hours on a mountainous dirt track barely wide enough for one vehicle, with blind corners every hundred yards or so. Phil poked his head out of the window at one stage, and couldn’t even see the road below - it was just a 200 metre drop, straight down. All good stories for round the campfire.

But occasionally these stories don’t have a happy ending. You may have heard about the bus that crashed in the Lake Titicaca area (more here if you haven’t). We were on the same route, with the same bus company, and possibly on the same bus four days before this happened. Obviously it shook us up a bit, and needless to say we’re sticking to reputable bus companies travelling during the day from now on.

We’ve had a couple of big highlights in the last week or so. First one was a bike ride down the “World’s Most Dangerous Road” (aka the Yungas Road, Map), which goes from just outside La Paz (4800m above sea level) down into the riotous vegetation of the Yungas region (1100m). It was snowing at the top, and sunny and warm at the bottom. As you could guess it was mostly downhill, although a large chunk of it was on dirt road similar to that described above. It earns its “World’s Most Dangerous” moniker because some of the vertical drops over the edge are over 600m, and you don’t just sustain injuries from that height. Fortunately, there were lots of precautions we could take on our bikes to avoid becoming statistics!!

The other highlight was a Pampas tour in the Rurrenabaque region, North of (and a long way below) La Paz. Hard to imagine this lush jungle environment being so close to the barren altiplano, but its just 220km from La Paz, at an altitude of just 300m. We took a boat trip into the Pampas (grasslands), part of the Amazonian basin, where the wildlife was so abundant we didn’t know where to look. There were literally hundreds of alligators, capybaras (world’s largest rodent!), and several anacondas, tarantulas, monkeys, kingfishers and sloths, all hanging out by the river banks as we drifted past. Got bitten to hell by mosquitos, and couldn’t shower for three days (boy did we stink!) but it was well worth it.

Now we’ve returned breathless to La Paz before heading South. That’s if a public transport strike has been lifted by tomorrow - the roads were completely empty today as hardly anyone has private vehicles. Next stop is Potosi (World’s highest city) then onto the Salt Flats down in the South. Then we should cross the border into Chile around 4 September.

(2023 Update: photos from this trip were uploaded to Flickr a couple of years later, here are snaps from Peru and Bolivia, and a link to the collection for the whole trip can be found here)