La Paz
Trip Start
Aug 31, 2007
1
15
51
Trip End
Ongoing
La Paz,
Bolivia
Sunday, September 30, 2007
On our second day in La Paz we got out and about. We went to the outside of San Pedro prison ... some of you may have heard about it if you have read a book called Marching Powder. San Pedro is one of the strangest prisons in the world ... it is like its own little city ... the prisons have jobs inside the prison and earn money, which they need to buy their own cells from real estate agents. There are homeless people in the jail with no cell to sleep in & there are very rich prisoners with cable TV. Children live with their fathers inside the jail and leave each day to go to school. There are restaurants and shops that prisoners run on the inside
Which way do I want to go?
. There are also drugs being produced and sold inside, which the officials turn a blind eye too. Its a very unique place!There used to be a prisoner (who the book is about) who ran tours of the prison. The government has now stopped this, but we tried to get in anyway, without success. We did have a good chat to the official top dog of the prison, who just happened to be standing outside as we were hanging around. You can actually see the prisoners from the road! There are about 1500 prisoners at the moment and about 10 gringos, mostly in there for drug crimes. One of the prisoners, Sebastian, a Dutch traveller who was caught with cocaine & has been in the prison for about 2 years, sent us a note asking for us to help and buy him some food. The colonel found a professor who works in the prison to talk to us who advised against helping Sebastian as he would just sell the food and get money for drugs. Strange that these people are put away for drug crimes, yet they cant stamp out the drug problem inside the prison!
Once we had all the information we could get, we went for a walk to a lookout. La Paz is the highest capital in the world and is set in a valley with beautiful mountains all around. It was a very hot day & it was a long way up to the look out
La Paz
! The map we had wasnt very good and the path through the park was under construction, so we climbed a few fences to get to what we thought was the look out, but turned out to be a closed kiddy park. There were slides and swings and odd things to play on ... and a pretty good view of the city too! Eventually we were shoo'ed out by a cranky security guard.Lunch and a bit of shopping followed ... they have a witch's market, where you can buy all sorts of trinkets and weird stuff ... protection charms, fortune charms, potions to attract love ... and even llama foetuses which you are supposed to buy 4 of when you build a new house and place one in each corner for good luck. Gross! But very interesting.
We went mountain biking the next day for the whole day, which took up a lot of our time in La Paz, so there is much we didnt see. A bit of a shame as it is very interesting place and there is a lot to do!
