As we handed over £4 to the cab driver who had just taken us from La Paz bus station to our new address at 7am, I looked up at the house in front of us and again thanked my lucky stars for airbnb. We were shown straight to our room at Landscape B&B, it was huge, clean and had a fantastic view over La Paz.
La Paz is like a bowl, it has the Main Street running through the middle and then everything is built up the side, as it is in a valley. This is incredibly tough for walking and why traffic in the city is so bad as people don't want to constantly be walking up or down the steep streets. So they drive or take these mini bus things that work like collectivos so you jump in and pay about 10p and then jump out at your destination. These minibuses have numbers on them so work like buses in London and have a set route to follow.
La Paz is located about 3650m above sea level so again Nathan and I were feeling the effects of altitude and climbing up and down the streets was even more challenging than usual. It is the highest de facto capital in the world. While the official capital of Bolivia (and its seat of justice) is Sucre (which I had no idea about) La Paz has more government departments.
In our 3 days there I took my camera out with me and not my phone so I don't have a lot of photos to upload to the blog. So I will have to be good at describing and you will have to have a good imagination.
On our first day in La Paz we slept after our hideous over night bus journey and then went out and about for a walk to get our bearings. We ended up going for an early dinner in an amazing typical Bolivian restaurant called Luciernagas which at the moment seems unvisited by tourists. The place was family run with the Bolivian wife doing all the cooking and her Dutch husband working front of house. He chatted to Nathan and I about how he ended up in Bolivia and how he finds living here. We told him we eat anything and asked him to choose us some traditional food! The dishes were amazing, we got the cows tongue and the spicy chicken to share, both came with rice and potatoes. I had a glass of red wine and Nathan a Bolivian beer and including a tip the total was £10! I was pretty excited to be served some spicy green sauce to accompany the meal as there definitely has not been enough spicy accompaniments throughout our travels so far.
While talking about food I must mention the street food snacks that are extremely popular called Saltinas. On Monday lunch time we went to Pacena Salteña for some amazing snacks. We got a vegetarian and a meat Salteña each. They were 55p a piece and were awesome for lunch time, they are a little like Cornish pasty's they were juicy with a rich gravy. On Tuesday we tried a potato street food. Bolivians are obsessed with their potatoes, they have hundreds of different varieties and can be referred to as a nation as Mr & Mrs Potato head. Anyway this potato snack was called papas rellenas as was looked like a crispy potato but when you bite into it you had lovely fluffy mash and a meaty centre, it was like a hand held shepherds pie.
This year Evo Morales (the president since 2006) instructed the building of cable cars across the city to help those who live at the very top get down to the bottom a lot quicker. It is also going to reduce traffic. The red line opened on the 30th of May and the yellow line on the 15th of September. Nathan and I had the opportunity to take the yellow line which for 60p return is an absolute bargain as you got to ride the longest urban cable car in the world across 3.9km of La Paz. The scenery and views were excellent. The cable cars have been such a success a green line has been built and is due to open before the end of the year and Morales has commissioned more to be built in the next year. I think La Paz will end up in about 5 years being in guide books as the city to visit to ride the cable cars!
Talking about Evo Morales, we had a really interesting tour with Red Cap Walking Tours and our guide Dani was extremely interesting and told us some pretty funny things about the president. So apparently at times he puts his foot in it on national TV. One example is when he made a comment that eating chicken made you homosexual and drinking coca-cola made you bald. He had to make a public apology to both the homosexual and bald communities. The second comment I found shocking was when he was saying that Bolivia needs to raise it's population so he was going to ban condoms and any other form of contraception! This did not go down well with the Bolivians so he decided against that and came up with another idea which was to make girls over the age of 18 pay a tax if they had not had a child, they were able to stop paying the tax when they gave birth to their first born. The woman of La Paz took to the streets and protested and again Evo Morales made a public apology. What he has finally decided to do is give 200 Bolivianos (almost £20) to every pregnant woman as a gift and therefore as encouragement to others to get pregnant. It's funny because even though he seems to make these massive mistakes he seems well liked by the Bolivian people and last month he got voted to stay as president for another term.
Ok so back to these bowler hats, apparently they were made in England in the late 1800s and were shipped to Bolivia for English workers but they were too small. Instead of throwing them out they were given to the women in Bolivia telling them that they were the latest fashion in Europe. So it became vastly popular among the women from the Aymara indigenous group to wear them.
The way the ladies wear their bowler hats is a bit like your relationship status on Facebook. If the hat is in the middle of your head it means you are married, if it is slightly to one side it means you are single or widowed as if it is tipping back at the back it means 'it is complicated' (although I'm not sure about the last one I think the guide was having me on).
The waking tour was really informative and answered a lot of questions I had about the typical Bolivian dress some of the ladies wore with the bowler hats. This is something that is passed down from mother to daughter and a lady cannot suddenly choose to wear this dress with the bowler hat if it is not in her family. These ladies are called cholas and cholitas, they are pillars of Bolivian society and are extremely well respected. They work hard and lots of them sell fruit on the market. I found it really interesting that as a family you would have one cholita that you would buy your groceries from and your mother would go to the same one and your daughter would shop at the same one. To buy your fruit and vegetables from a cholita sitting next to your cholita would be disrespectful. Also you do not ask for a discount in Bolivia instead you ask for a little bit extra, la yapa, as in Bolivian culture if you love or like someone you feed them more. Being a little bit chubby and curvy is sexy and means you are loved! Also for a man if his wife is bigger it means she can carry the babies, the shopping, climb the La Paz hills at the same time as pulling a Llama behind her, this is seem as sexy. The sexiest part of a woman in Bolivia is her calves, her strong, big, rounded calves!
We visited the witches market where there was liquids and potions for all sorts of problems. As mentioned earlier, La Paz is at an altitude of 3650m and apparently this can effect a mans performance in bed so there was lots of magical potions similar to the medical form of Viagra. However years ago a test was done and found that they were selling horse Viagra and men died of heart attacks so now it is nearer to a dose of Viagra than anything else with a swirl of herbs and other ingredients. They sells potions to make people fall in love with you too. They also sell dried llama foetus which look a bit scary. They don't kill the llama for these but they get them if they find a pregnant llama dead. These llama foetus' have to be buried under every house or construction in Bolivia for good luck and a ritual must be performed by a witch doctor. To become a witch doctor you must have been born in a particular region in Bolivia and survived a lightening strike so as you can imagine there are not to many of them around
We also visited the museum of musical instruments. I am not going to lie visiting museums isn't always my favourite thing to do. However this museum was pretty good as it was hands on, even Nathan laughed and said 'you like this museum coz you can touch everything!' Yes indeed I did! You could touch and play with most of the traditional instruments it was great and as you can imagine Nathan was loving it. There were instruments from thousands of years ago made from animal shells and skin which was fascinating.
On our last morning when we were on the bus trying to leave La Paz we got caught up for the best part of an hour in the middle of a protest in the street! I took this opportunity to snap a few photos on my phone.
La Paz is totally different from any city I have ever been to. Firstly for it's crazy design in a valley, then for it's mix of men in suits going to work and traditional Bolivian Cholitas walking up and down the hills carrying their children on their back. It was an awesome, crazy, vibrant city with kind friendly people and great food.