La Paz means peace
Trip Start
Nov 01, 2006
1
167
179
Trip End
Oct 31, 2007
La Paz,
Bolivia
Thursday, September 13, 2007
So, we managed to get some sleep on the overnight journey and arrived in La Paz at 7 in the morning, itching, in my case, to get to the BA office and try to change our flights to get me home early. Of course we had to wait until office opening hours but those couple of hours were easily killed with checking into the hotel and having a nice London-style coffee shop breakfast (oh the joys of capital cities). I won't bore you with all the details, but basically the One-World alliance is not quite as 'allied' as I'd like it to be and changing the flights took all morning, involved us visiting 3 different offices, telephoning British Airways in Brazil and still not getting a booking on the flight we wanted
01 La Paz
. The nearest we could get to the date we wanted was 15th October, so that's when we're leaving, in the end only just over 2 weeks before the year is up, but it's something, and I feel so excited that it's now less than 5 weeks till we go home (not that I'm counting...). For the rest of the afternoon we enjoyed the trappings of the capital city in the form of proper coffees and cake (thank you so much to Kuchen Stube for giving me a wonderful piece of carrot cake - proper moist, tasty, not too sweet cake, easily the best I've had on the whole trip!). After that we were energised to go hunting for a lovely hotel in which to spend our first wedding anniversary, which amazingly comes around this weekend. We discovered that a lot of these posh hotels have special romantic packages which they tell you about if you tell them it's your anniversary (it's a good ruse therefore, even if it's not true). So we had a lovely time going round all these nice hotels, looking at sumptious rooms and beautiful swimming pools and hearing all about the freebies they'd give us for paying a lower than usual price! We eventually settled on the Europa hotel, where we will supposedly get champagne, strawberries and cream, an in-room jacuzzi, a romantic room-service breakfast and don't have to check-out till 5pm on the last day. We can't wait!La Paz is a very busy city and feels like it has far too many people living in it and that they're all out on the streets all the time
02 Tihuanacu statue
. It takes an age to walk anywhere what with dodging all the pedestrians and traffic and little old ladies sitting on the pavement selling puffed rice. We've also found ourselves quite on edge and wary of our wallets when walking around because we've heard numerous reports of thefts in the city. So all in all this means that it's a really nice place if you just enjoy the nice coffee shops, restaurants, cinemas etc and stay off the streets as much as possible. With this in mind then, the next day we got our numerous jobs done as quickly as possible then headed to the posh, and much quieter and safer-feeling ex-pat area and had a look at the British Embassy which made us feel all dewy-eyed and patriotic. We followed this walk around with a brilliant sushi lunch at Wagamama, and in the afternoon we retreated to one of those lovely modern coffee shops, before heading to the cinema to see '23' with Jim Carey, which was mildly diverting but a bit weak, in our humble opinion. Today we pleased Tim by crossing another UNESCO site off his list, but even he had to admit that this particular one was not especially interesting. It was a site called Tihuanacu, about 80km out of La Paz, which is the centre of an extensive pre-Incan civilisation dating back to around 1200 BC. Sounds good on paper, doesn't it? but I'm afraid it just wasn't very interesting or impressive, and the guide wasn't that good at making it appear so either. So whilst it was good to cross it off the list, in a way we wished we'd stayed in the city to drink coffee and eat cake. This evening we had a lovely time at the Vienna restaurant where we were looked after by white-suited waiters in a lovely old-fashioned dining room with a pianist playing classical music the whole time. OK, so the food wasn't amazing, but for once that didn't really matter, we just enjoyed the ambience and had a lovely time. (R)
