Big city lots of markets...
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2007
1
7
22
Trip End
??? ??, 2008
La Paz, Bolivia
Sunday, December 9, 2007
We arrived in La Paz to dark grey rain clouds in a big, dirty city which made us feel utterly depressed. Hang on a minute! Big city, huge rain clouds and lots of markets? That sounds like Brum! This should´ve made us feel at home, but it didn´t. Our moods were appeased by the mighty Brosso´s - A monumental ice cream parlour on the main road, which we were obliged to visit for 4days in a row to replenish our lack of good dairy and fruit after our food poisoning episodes.
Our hotel which was conveniently located in the witches market, gave Stan the heeby jeebies - probably due to the fact that you see lots of stuffed animals and dried llama foetuses everywhere, eerily lit by a street light and manned by local women who spend all day chewing coca leaves so when they smile at you by night, you are met with a toothy grin blackened by the coca.
Now if you´re in La Paz, and fancy doing something gentle and relaxing, you must mountain bike down the ´worlds most dangerous road´! (A 2m wide road hugging a cliff and ravine with rusting wrecks of trucks from fatal accidents, marked with makeshift gravestones from kamikazee cyclists and drivers, which you mountain bike down without tryin to kill yourself!) We didn´t do it cos I wimped out - only cos it was rainy, and death didn´t sound too appealing that day, Stan was up for it, and I totally regretted wimping out, so we have made a gung ho pact not to chicken out of dangerous sounding escapades again.
A great place to visit is the Coca Museum which is far more entertaining then it sounds. Loads of interesting facts for example that Sigmund Freud was the worlds first celebrity cocaine user, it was widely used as anaesthesia, it was only banned in the 1950´s and that there are only a handful of countries that can still import coca leaves legally from Bolivia (for medical purposes one assumes), the biggest importer being Coco Cola (500kgs a year) because apparently they just use it for the flavour, (hmm wonder if that one would work on the customs officer...)
Having overdosed on way too much icecream, we decided to head out of there and down towards Uyuni. We got on a overnight bus and tried to get some sleep on the road from hell...
