Hostal Republica La Paz

Bonjour à tous, Merci pour vos messages sur yahoo.ca. J´ai déjà parlé de la très belle route qui relie Copacabana à La Paz. Nous avons eu la chance de la faire par temps parfaitement clair, ce qui est rare en cette saison, et nous avons pu admirer les pics enneigés de la Sierra Real. Le plus pittoresque de cette route est la traversée d´un détroit par un bac encore bien plus vétuste que celui qui reliait jusqu´en août dernier Oka et Hudson. Tous les passagers doivent descendre du bus et trave...

After the beautiful city of Sucre we arrived in La Paz - a city that according to all the guide books you either love or hate. In the blog so far I have tried to be positive about all the places that we have travelled to - sometimes I have left one or two grey area out and tried to keep with the nice bits. It is really, really tough to do that with La Paz. It now has the distinction of being the only place on the planet where we have been tear gassed whilst trying to buy a stamp - may be thin...

After Rurrenabaque and the beautiful Bolivian Pampas we unhappily made our way to La Paz - I made my displeasure clear by throwing up for the last 10 hours of our 18 hour bus journey. After a day recovering in La Paz I was feeling much better so we decided to climb a nearby 'Mirador' (viewpoint) to get a view over the city. I must admit La Paz from above is an incredible site - sprawling up a huge valley for as far as the eye can see, it is an engineering masterpiece. It also sits in the shad...

Easter weekend in La Paz! No turkey dinner here, but Ceri did get her easter egg hunt! Matt was a good easter bunny! La Paz is fascinating. It is a genuine South American city in every way. There is hustle and bustle everywhere. The streets are too narrow for too many cars, and the sidewalks are way too narrow for way too many pedestrians. Plaza Murillo is a nice colonial plaza surrounded by a presidential palace and the national congress. It´s a quiet place except for the 100 riot police pat...

La Paz is topographically unlike any other city we have visited. We have travelled to cities ringed by hills but La Paz is a large city which creeps up the side of one mountain and down the side of another. It's as if a giant picnic blanket has been shaken and outstretched on this larger than life, up and down landscape. Wherever this blanket has touched the earth a zillion dwellings have been erected. Looking up the walls of this mountain you can see the morass of lower socioeconomic residen...

(fairly dull entry coming up)
After spending a few days relaxing in hammocks in Rurranebaque, it was time to head back to La Paz for one final burst of altitude before our trip ended.
Our alarm clock went off at 5.30am... we were to be at the Amaszonas office by 6.10am... and surprisingly, for once, we were early!
All the passengers piled into the minibus bound for the airport, where our luggage was weighed on a scales that looks like it came out of the ark.! It was shoddy enough no...

Seems the highway patrol has found a jack-knifed rig In a snow bank in Illinois... Oh, but the man upstairs was listening When Mama asked him to bring Daddy home And when the call came in it was Daddy on the other end Askin' her if she had been singin' the song, singin' Roll on highway, roll on along Roll on Daddy till you get back home Roll on family, roll on crew Roll on Mama like I asked you to do And roll on eighteen-wheeler, roll on So the bus journey to Coroico was scary. The bus journe...

You can throw your luggage down Lose your cool and stamp around But there's nothin, nothin you can do Wipe away your girlfriend's tears Go to the bar and have some beers There ain't no way the bird's gettin through No plane on Sunday Maybe be one come Monday Just a hopeless situation Make the best of it's all you can do till they get through Well, we found out later on that there was indeed a plane from La Paz to Sucre, and it didn´t cost so darn much. But then we wouldn´t have the Great Bus ...