My day at Lima airport isn't worth more than this sentence. I slept all thru the night flight to Bolivia and even my trained food trolley ears didn't wake me up. Landing at El Alto airport, I was still 4000 metres above sea level and could feel it.
Only a few minutes into the taxi ride, we dodged a late night llama and then descended into the canyon through which La Paz is built. The night lights of the city were quite a sight. Here, the poor live along the highlands and the rich at the bottom.
As I found my accommodation I acknowledged a bit of a dehydration problem as I was now in a don't-drink-the-water country, nothing seemed available at this time of night and my last sip was a nation ago. Survival priorities rate shelter before water, so I tried to take comfort in this and slept. In the morning I found bottled water then breakfast, then started exploring.
Because La Paz is built into the sides of mountains it's Stairmaster City. Combine this with a 4km jump in altitude and it didn't take long to feel dizzy and short of breath. This was combined with a feeling in my right temple like I was being haunted by an angry woodpecker. I took regular breaks and decided not to get too ambitious with my exploration on this first day.
I felt safer here among these polite and little Bolivian people. Police and military officers stood on most corners in the city with ready-to-go barricades. I'd looked into the common types of crimes and they were theft (eg. pickpockets) and deception via fake police (also leading to theft). I did see a store where I could buy the full police outfit.
Bolivia day 2, I ate some llama lasange then did a less-commercial city tour with what turned out to be my personal guide, Jorge from Banjo Tours. We walked past the signicant buildings and places that told the story of Bolivia's suppressions and revolutions, and the repeat of this cycle until it became the landlocked nation it is today. Some uprisings have been more recent as evidenced by machine gun hole ventilation.
The tour included the satellite city of El Alto, where a police presence was much more absent. Jorge explained that here the law was governed by the people, with hangings and burnings on the menu of punishments. The scarecrows here detered a different species.
We made our way to the "real" witches market (as opposed to the tourist-themed version in the city below). Now if you have an eye for fashion when it comes to llama fetuses, this is the place to be. Dead llamas galore hung from each store in all manner of contortions. Apparently, the Earth mother just luuurrvves these twisted animal corpses. That seemed like quite a coincidence to me, in that llamas were abundant in this part of the world.
We returned to La Paz to see the infamous St Pedros prison which is run by the prisoners. In the not-so-distant past, an inmate used to offer tours to the public but that was shut down a few years ago after the inevitable. A bit of online research suggested that there was still a way to get in by meeting up at a place in the park across from the jail at a certain time but it sounded dodgy and I wasn't jumping at the opportunity. I later talked to someone who said there was a tear gas heavy police intervention the day before. He had filmed it from the same place I was standing, but an officer had snatched his camera away to delete the footage.
I now had a good idea of how to navigate the city, but pushing thru the altitude effects had turned the volume up on the migrane woodpecker.
Only a few minutes into the taxi ride, we dodged a late night llama and then descended into the canyon through which La Paz is built. The night lights of the city were quite a sight. Here, the poor live along the highlands and the rich at the bottom.
As I found my accommodation I acknowledged a bit of a dehydration problem as I was now in a don't-drink-the-water country, nothing seemed available at this time of night and my last sip was a nation ago. Survival priorities rate shelter before water, so I tried to take comfort in this and slept. In the morning I found bottled water then breakfast, then started exploring.
Because La Paz is built into the sides of mountains it's Stairmaster City. Combine this with a 4km jump in altitude and it didn't take long to feel dizzy and short of breath. This was combined with a feeling in my right temple like I was being haunted by an angry woodpecker. I took regular breaks and decided not to get too ambitious with my exploration on this first day.
I felt safer here among these polite and little Bolivian people. Police and military officers stood on most corners in the city with ready-to-go barricades. I'd looked into the common types of crimes and they were theft (eg. pickpockets) and deception via fake police (also leading to theft). I did see a store where I could buy the full police outfit.
Bolivia day 2, I ate some llama lasange then did a less-commercial city tour with what turned out to be my personal guide, Jorge from Banjo Tours. We walked past the signicant buildings and places that told the story of Bolivia's suppressions and revolutions, and the repeat of this cycle until it became the landlocked nation it is today. Some uprisings have been more recent as evidenced by machine gun hole ventilation.
The tour included the satellite city of El Alto, where a police presence was much more absent. Jorge explained that here the law was governed by the people, with hangings and burnings on the menu of punishments. The scarecrows here detered a different species.
We made our way to the "real" witches market (as opposed to the tourist-themed version in the city below). Now if you have an eye for fashion when it comes to llama fetuses, this is the place to be. Dead llamas galore hung from each store in all manner of contortions. Apparently, the Earth mother just luuurrvves these twisted animal corpses. That seemed like quite a coincidence to me, in that llamas were abundant in this part of the world.
We returned to La Paz to see the infamous St Pedros prison which is run by the prisoners. In the not-so-distant past, an inmate used to offer tours to the public but that was shut down a few years ago after the inevitable. A bit of online research suggested that there was still a way to get in by meeting up at a place in the park across from the jail at a certain time but it sounded dodgy and I wasn't jumping at the opportunity. I later talked to someone who said there was a tear gas heavy police intervention the day before. He had filmed it from the same place I was standing, but an officer had snatched his camera away to delete the footage.
I now had a good idea of how to navigate the city, but pushing thru the altitude effects had turned the volume up on the migrane woodpecker.
No comments:
Post a Comment