Peaceful La Paz

I promised you a La Paz dedicated post, and here she is in all her glory...

Although La Paz shares its status as capital with Sucre, the latter is purely administration and doesn´t capture Bolivia´s "essence" as much as the former. La Paz is a microcosm of the country as a whole, a vibrant, buzzing city set in spectacular surroundings.

As previously mentioned, the city is at about 3.600 metres above sea level, which makes for a somewhat surreal cityscape and climate. Set in a canyon in the Andes, the city sprawls up and down its walls, and in its background, the snowy peaks reveal the extremeness of this altitude. Like San Francisco, the cities streets are rarely level, and most of the time you find yourself either battling uphill in a breathless frenzy or stumbling downhill trying not to snot yourself on the many pathway hazards. These endless possibilities to trip up (potholes, uneven paving, no paving, kids playing, old women sitting on the ground with their "moichandice") require you to keep your eyes down when walking, but if you can manage to rip them away from the ground for a second, you´re almost always rewarded with a fantastic view of the urban sprawl and its Andean backdrop.

La Paz isn´t far off the size of Dublin, with a nudge over a million people (although estimates vary... statistics isn´t a priority in Bolivia). However, walking around during the day, you would swear its a lot more than that. Every square inch of the city is dedicated to some kind of commercial activity... and from early morning until late at night swarms of Bolivians move in and amongst each other going about their daily business in the most chaotic manner. The concept of a shop being limited to its four walls is not for La Paz... you buy and sell everything and anything on the street, the shops have to spill out onto the pavement and road to compete with the rest of the marketeers, or else they´ll be left in the recesses, unable even to be seen by any potential customer.

Different roads have different "moichendice" specialities: you can find your DIY road, your fresh fruit & veg road, your meat road, your toiletries road, your household cleaning equipment road, your catholic icon road, your car accessory road, your makeup road, etc, etc, etc... the list goes on...! Somewhere, buried in every stall you have your standard Bolivian women slumbering among her tightly packed and immaculately arranged choice of products. Every now and then you have one of the many support trolleys common to every road: fresh fruit juices, nuts and crisps, shoe cleaners (who all wear balaclavas for some reason). Frequently you have people standing in front of the stalls, shouting and screaming their heads off so that you buy their soap//DVDs/tomatoes/detergent. And things get a lot less organised than that... in any available spot that hasn´t been taken by some "official" market booth, you will always get someone who plonks themselves down and sells some randomly bizarre product (or mix of products) from a small rug.

Then there´s the transport: There are no trains or darts or trams or anything like that, if you want to get somewhere and you don´t want to walk, then you go by road. The roads are chockablock with a plethora of different four-(and two-) wheel vehicles, none of which appear to be in any way privately owned or operated.

First of all, there´s the official buses, these are usually old American school buses which have been painted in extravagant colours and dedicated either to some catholic icon or someone from Bolivia´s glorious past. These beasts trundle through the roads (actually, they are usually limited to about one lane with market booths at a hair´s breadth either side) spitting out diesel fumes into the faces of all they pass.

Then there´s the "truffi´s" or Japanese mini-vans. Each of these run different routes through the city and are essentially a private bus network... there´s one driver who appears to glue his hand to the horn every morning and then there´s usually some little teenager who hangs out the open door shouting out the destinations and the prices... When one of these passes you, you have to be very careful not to make eye contact with the "shouter" or else he´ll hop out and bail you into the van before you can say knickerbockerglory.

Finally, there´s the ever present normal taxi... I say "normal" but I think that to be a driver of these instruments of death you have to be certified pathologically homicidal. They´re all over the place... and whereas in Europe our taxi´s have the objective of picking people up and delivering them to their stated destinations... here they seem to aim to maim, and take delightful pleasure in ignoring anyone who actually wants to exchange money for private motorised propulsion! When you cross a street here, all the taxis seem to actually turn around and go for you... I swear to God, they completely deviate from their course, and speed up so as to hit you or one of your extremities if at all possible. And just to make this assault all the more petrifying, they beep their horns manically as they swerve to hit you...

I believe that I have survived here, only because I always pretend that I´m actually looking for a taxi... if you cross the road with your hand in the air... they´ll all do a runner, god forbid they might pick up a fair!

So all this motorised and commercial activity gives La Paz a loud buzz which rings in your ears when you lie in bed at night. It´s by the far the most dynamic city I´ve ever been to and a complete contrast to its tranquil capital-buddy, Sucre.

I´ve got to say that I love it though, its energy is inexhautible!

Tomorrow, I´ll wave goodbye to the murderous taxi drivers and sleepy marketeers, and I´m gonna make my way to Copacabana, a city on Lake Titicaca, right by the Peruvian border where my last look at Bolivia will be Lake Titicaca´s Isla del Sol.

Buenos noches, compadres...