La Paz may be my favorite city of the trip

Trip Start Aug 10, 2008
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Trip End Sep 20, 2008


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Flag of Bolivia  ,
Saturday, September 13, 2008

It's official--I really like La Paz. It's crowded and chaotic, but colorful and beautiful and CHEAP! Yesterday we wandered around and paid for our various tours, saw the Church of San Franciscoand had lunch ($4 each for a 3 course meal with drinks) and walked through the streets of various handicraft vendors. As you walk around, you can see canyon walls in the distance with adobe-style houses clinging to the slopes. Dinner was llama medallions and Andean lamb stew.

Today John went off to do his crazy mountain-biking trip, and I spent another day wandering around the city. Started out by visiting a fair-trade craft store, then made my way down to the Cathedral.  There was something going on there, so I didn't get to poke around as much inside as I would have liked. On the way back I walked through the witches market, which is hard to distinguish from all the other stalls but is distinct because it's mostly herbs and dried llama foetuses and baby llamas. After lunch I walked to the Mercado Negro--an amalgam of traditional items, fake brand name clothes, and pirated dvds. To get there you walk up a street where there were a huge number of stores selling toilets and tiles, which then morphed into stores selling various other hardwares. Next to the black market are streets full of stalls selling vegetables, baked goods, grains, and various meats.

The women in La Paz tend to wear traditional clothing (except for the young people): braids, bowler hats, ruffled skirts, and shawls. Some of it is absolutely stunning. The men tend to wear more western clothing--I even saw a guy in a Penn State sweatshirt today. There's swarms of taxis (of various types and varying reliability), shared vans, buses, and the occasional private vehicle. The taxis here are even cheaper than in Ecuador (running about 8 bolivianos for a 15-20 minute ride, the current exchange rate is about 7 bolivianos to the dollar) and despite the horrible traffic, you don't feel like you're taking your life in your hands when you get in one. Mostly because everything moves slowly and most roads only have 1 lane of traffic. Very few intersections have lights or even stop signs, so I'm not sure how they work out who gets right of way, but it seems to all keep moving.

Tomorrow we leave bright and early (5:45 am) for a trip up to and across Lake Titicaca. That will have us back in Peru tomorrow evening, our last border crossing until we get back home.
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