Handful Of Throttle: La Paz

By Sanne

We entered La Paz from the north via El Cumbre at 4700m and descended into the steep valley that La Paz sits in at 3660m. It is a city of gothic proportions and it is an impressive sight to see this giant sprawl with the medieval-looking buildings sitting haphazardly on the steep slopes while to the south snow-peaked mountain Illimani (6402m) watches over the city.

It was a Sunday afternoon and the city was surprisingly quiet. That combined with our new Polish aquaintances’ GPS meant that we found our hotel super easy, but even without GPS it would have been pretty easy. I have definitely ridden in far worse cities before.

We checked in to Residencial Sucre which is a nice and central hotel located on Plaza San Pedro right across from the San Pedro prison which was made famous in the book Marching Powder. The owner of the hotel, and older man, is super nice and let us park the bikes right in the foyer. With our two bikes caked in dust from our ride and the Polish guys’ bike caked in mud from their ride, I was surprised he let us take them inside, but no problem at all. We met up with the guys later to go out for dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant, Star of India, which we had heard was really good, but it was overpriced and the food was pretty ordinary. I have found that, especially here in Bolivia, whenever I go to more expensive restaurants and restaurants caterering to gringos, the food is usually really ordinary. However, when I go to a local market or small local restaurant and eat a $2 meal it is super tasty and I walk away from there satisfied. And anyway, I much prefer to eat my food in the company of locals than with gringos. Lunch (almuerzo) is the biggest meal here in Bolivia and even in the smallest towns here, we have been able to get something without meat (although we have to help them along a bit by suggesting what they can serve for us, if you simply ask for ‘algo sin carne’ = ‘something without meat’ – you’re sure to get a No!)

Monday morning the first thing on our agenda was to go to the Danish Embassy to hand in my application for a new passport. After 3 years of travel I have collected a huge amount of stamps from various countries, non the least from crossing the Chile-Argentina border numerous times, and am now completely out of blank pages. In the email correspondence I had had with the embassy, they told me it would be an approximately 10-12 day turn-around to get a new passport. Then when I was there I was told that it can take up to 3-4 weeks! I told them that I only have limited time left on my Bolivian visa and really would appreciate it if it could be done faster. So they put ‘urgent’ on the application and sent it off. The passport is being printed in Denmark hence the time, but I really hope I won’t have to wait 4 weeks! Fingers crossed I won’t have to.

That afternoon Mark and I went on a free walking tour of the city which was really well worth it. The tour meets every day at 11am and then at 2pm on Plaza San Pedro and is very popular with travellers. We usually don’t do touristy stuff like tours and the like but we thought ‘heck it’s free, why not?’ Well, it was so enjoyable. The two guides, a young Bolivian gay guy and a young Kiwi girl who now lives in La Paz were so entertaining and really funny as well. We cracked up several times of the guy’s stories of how flirting works in Bolivia (apparently Bolivian men like a nice, brown, juicy calf of a woman) and of how he fancies Prince Harry! They started of telling us about the San Pedro prison, which is unique in the way that it is run almost entirely by the prisoners themselves. Inside the walls, it is its own community with even families living there including children. Each prisoner has to actually pay for their room in the prison and the more money you’ve got, well, the more comfortable digs you can buy; there are prisoners in there who live in appartments with jacuzzis,; on the other end of the scale the have-nots have to share a room with maybe 10-20 other prisoners with only a soddy mattress on the hard floor to sleep on.

You can also conduct business in there, again if you have money you can rent additional space to open up a restaurant (of which there are several inside the prison) or you can continue doing whatever you were doing on the outside, there are shoemakers, hairdressers, dentists and doctors in there – all prisoners themselves. About 80% of the inmates are there for drug-related crimes, but hey, don’t let prison get in the way of that! So cocaine production is thriving inside the walls. In fact rumour has it that it is the purest cocaine in Bolivia. We were told that whenever a batch is ready, it gets hurled out of the prison roof and right into the arms of their contact on the outside who is waiting on the street. Definitely not your average run-of-the-mill prison! The building which was once a monastery was only built to house 500 people max. At the moment, 2500 souls live in there. It is an incredibly cheap prison for the government to run as the only expense is the wages of the guards on the outside. The inside guards are prisoners and everything else, people have to pay for themselves.

We were told that the minimum sentence for drug possesion is 8 years, and in Bolivia you’re not ‘innocent until proven guilty’ but the other way around. The judicial system here is also not the fastest, so it might very well be a few years before your case makes it to court, all the while you’re stuck in for example San Pedro prison. Then when you finally get sentenced to say 8 years, the time you have already done, does not get subtracted from that, so you have to do 8 years from that moment on, even though you have already been in prison for 3 years! Not fair? Well, that’s life in many aspects of Bolivian society.

The nearby Rodrigues markets is a massive market that stretches for 12 or so blocks where you can find everything from apples and onions to lap tops and stolen goods. We managed to find a cheap external harddrive there as someone (not mentioning any names Mark) broke ours in Sucre and hence all our gopro footage from South America is gone. We need a new internal part of the harddrive replaced, a part they don’t have in Bolivia but we’ve been told that it can be done in more developed countried like Australia so here’s hoping!

Another more interesting market in La Paz is The Witches Markets. There you can find herbal and folk remedies for curing everything from headaches to impotence, powder to put a spell on people, oh and llama fetuses! The fetuses are used as an offering to Pachamama (Mother Earth) for when people build a new house. The fetus is burried underneath the foundations of the building. Now, that’s the offering for a small house...if you’re constructing let’s say a multi-story building, well, Pachamama wants something bigger than a small llama fetus, something like...an actual person! Yes, tradition is to find a homeless person, get him stupidly drunk on a drink that is spiked, kidnap him and bring him to the building site after which you bury him under the foundations. Nice, huh? Although no one will ever admit to doing this, everyone usually knows someone who knows someone...

While we were in La Paz we took the new cable car that just opened earlier this year to El Alto. El Alto is a city that sits right above La Paz at 4100m and from there you get a great view over all of La Paz. It is really cold and windy up there and not a particularly nice area as it’s very poor (and a little dangerous apparently). They have a huge market up here on Thursdays and Sundays and as it was a Thursday we wandered around the market where you can buy all sorts of things like parts for cars like diffs, brake calipers, carburettors right next to bananas and shoes. They love markets in Bolivia.

We were incredibly lucky to be in La Paz to experience the annual festival of La Fiesta del Gran Poder. El Gran Poder is one of, if not THE most important festival in Bolivia throughout the year. During this festival, which is a homage to Nuestro Señor del Gran Poder (Our Lord of Great Power) tens of thousands of people parade through the streets dancing and playing music. The sight of grown adults dressed in outrageous costumes, drinking and dancing their way through the city could seem like an odd form of religious devotion, but the participants (and spectators) don´t seem to see any contradiction in combining the sincere expression of religious belief with a riotous party – indeed the act of dancing nonstop for several hours at high altitude in a heavy costume can be seen as an exhausting form of devotional sacrifice! It was nothing less than spectacular to watch and a great experience.

The Sunday before we left, we again ventured up to El Alto, this time to watch the spectacle that is: Cholita Wrestling. Yep, Bolivian ladies who wrestle! Oh my god, was it entertaining! Incredibly amateurish but...entertaining. The ladies come into the ring wearing their traditional big skirts and bowler hats and then proceed to “pretend” to kick each others arses. There are male wrestlers as well, one was dressed as a clown and another was acting totally queer and was kissing on all the other male wrestlers, even the referee! How can I best explain this Bolivian wrestling? Imagine American wrestling D-grade and you might get the picture. The locals were getting really into it, heckling the fighters and hurling stuff into the ring like oranges and rubbish. Afterwards we were able to jump into the ring and pose for photos with the cholitas which was fun. Definitely a worthwhile experience to be had while in La Paz, if for nothing else than for the bizarre factor!

We enjoyed La Paz and felt safe there, despite the fact that it is known as one of the most dangerous cities in South America and we found the people here to be just as friendly as in the rest of Bolivia. As I was still waiting for my new passport to arrive, we decided to leave the city and tour around the Yungas and Lake Titicaca in the meantime, but we would return to the big smoke after that.

Women gathering on Plaza San Pedro, in front of the famous San Pedro prison

Llama foetuses...a bizarre sight

Just like christmas decorations!

Plaza San Francisco and San Francisco Cathedral

At Mercado Lanza, the main food market in La Paz,

at one of the many hole-in-the-wall almuerzo (lunch) restaurants

A shoe polisher at work - this is considered the lowest profession in Bolivia, hence why you see many of them wearing a mask to cover their faces, so no one will recognise them