A Wimba Way (Gold Teeth and a Curse for this town)

La Paz is Crazytown. Buckets of slop and car horn wars. Bolar hats and cheekbone hatstands. Being shouted at everywhere you go. Paul Theroux in The Old Patagonian express spotted a bizarre trend on his travels throughout South America whereby cities and towns and rivers and mountains would be so inappropriately named that the misnaming seemed deliberate. And so we have La Paz, meaning peaceful, but by far the noisiest city we've probably ever visited.


It’s located at an altitude of 3600m making it the highest capital city in the world. There’s several other interesting aspects to this beguiling city which contribute freely to the craziness, not least its people and their colourful culture and traditions, its bizarre topography and its swarming, restless streetlife. Poverty is endemic and the housing and accommodation is meagre at best. There’s very little room for the population in the valley so the city has expanded vertically, the ramshackle housing dramatically clawing its way up the side of the mountains overlooking La Paz. Building blocks are sold individually here and you get the impression that the primitive settlements are literally cobbled together in the most restrictive and inhospitable of spaces, brick by brick with minimal infrastructure to support them.


The Bolivians are a fecund people so the combination of the tiny houses and the very large families results in the colourful sacraments of Bolivian life pouring out onto the bustling chaotic streets. Other less palatable and even more colourful sacraments pour out onto the streets aswell but we don’t like to talk about those.


Meals in particular are public events with stews of many hues and ingredients being served from buckets and makeshift streetstalls to the food loving but hygiene starved Bolivians. Seeing a full family sit around one plate of dinner on a kerbside, each of them politely taking turns to retrieve their mouthfuls, is a common simultaneously touching and tragic sight. It’s very much a hand to mouth existence here. They’re very obviously a proud people and even though most meals are eaten in public, the meals are almost bashfully consumed. These goulash medleys are prepared al fresco on every street corner and in some doorways resulting in the headiest and most potent of smells singeing your nasal hair from very early morning. Llama stew for breakfast? Be still my thrashing stomach. For a fussy vegetarian like me, who likes his food it really was tough to find anything even vaguely edible. Anything I touched would either taste of meat or feature a surprise cameo meat derivative and I got a dodgy tummy on a couple of occasions. The one place where I could get guaranteed satisfactory sustenance was at an overpriced Burger King where I’d be charged full price for a Whopper……..without meat. Even this got really stale after a week.



The downtown area’s main thoroughfare is a landingstrip oasis of level land surrounded on all sides by steep hills rushing up and down around it. The effect of this bowl shaped city is that people and traffic tend to tumble out of the sidestreets belching cigarette smoke and diesel fumes only half in control of their own momentum and collisions between men and men and men and metal are common. La Paz has a relatively small but very heavily condensed population of about 1 million. All roads to and from La Paz are treacherous narrow arteries winding through threadlike mountain passes (more about them later ) giving the city a feeling of remote isolation, a sanctuary from the hardships of life in the rural Andes, a refuge from the biting winds.


All commerce in La Paz is negotiated on the street. A one-stop-shop supermarket in La Paz is rarer than rocking-horse shit. Everything from random cuts of bruised meat, vegetables in distress, cleaning products in filthy containers, stationary, small marble headstones, mechanical lubrication products, electrical switches, baby clothes, counterfeit sportswear, bolar hats and lucky charms are all sold in dedicated highly specialised streetside stalls packed to absolute capacity and manned by cocoa chomping women and children in their colourful native dress. The dark and musty cobblestone streets of the famous Witches Market is a very disturbing place.

Anyone there for the last of the baby tombs...

The indigenous peoples of Bolivia are very religious and one of their primary deitys is Pachamama – Mother Earth. All kinds of ritual and occult ceremony are performed in her honour and the accoutrements to these oft performed sacraments are freely available in the Witches Market. For example no building is erected anywhere in the country without a llama foetus buried underneath one of the corners as a sacrifice to Pachamama to protect the building. Other macabre ingredients for spells and customs include dried frogs (used for luck and riches) and armadilloes (hung over an entrance to ward off thieves).

Miniature talismans are also big business and the Bolivians believe that if you acquire your heart’s desire in miniature, the real thing will follow within the year. So you have racks of miniature ceramic houses, laptops, butcher shops, cars, babies, pianos – you name it, lining the stalls of the Witches Market and they’re some of the most popular purchases for squeamish tourists who wouldn’t feel right offering a llama foetus up as a souvenir.

How Do!

The footpath real estate business is cut throat, each pedestrian passageway colonised to its very edges by ambitious vendors and their unruly wares. The net effect of the congestion on the footpaths is that the hordes of pedestrians are forced out onto the street into the path of the Ben Hur movie that is La Paz’s traffic. Chaos seems to be encouraged here as a trial to be overcome. Chaos and cities normally coexist quite harmoniously. Chaos in La Paz was no fun. It was like bad jazz. The main artery, an integral link in the chain of one way street rat's nests which keep the city’s traffic moving, is commandeered on average 3 or 4 times a day by demonstrators or protestors hopelessly making some representation for their plight. Everything grinds to a vexed halt until the demonstration winds up or is broken down. We’ve seen several individual groups of protestors, apostles for completely separate causes, literally queue up on the periphery of the busiest junctions waiting their turn to contribute to the entropy. Demonstration is an art form in Bolivia, but apparently a highly ineffective one. Dynamite and fireworks are used in abundance to call attention to whatever demonstration du jour is snaking its way through the city. When you have 4 major demonstrations a day, with all of the protests unimaginatively incorporating dynamite to highlight their specific plight, all you get is annoyed. Like I’ve already said, La Paz is 24 hour noisy town.


Another primary contributor to the brain numbing noise pollution is the interesting Bolivian rule of the road which states that at a junction, whoever blows their horn first has right of way. So at every junction in the city you have upto 4 carhorns in competition to rise above the din and gain right of way. This rule becomes even more ridiculous if you’re trying to sleep anywhere near the city at night.

Dawn on the morning we arrived in La Paz

The place is an endless taxi/minibus traffic jam. Very few of the population own a car so the millions of taxis or collectivos (communal minibuses which run on a dedicated route and stop indiscriminately, anytime anywhere to pick up passengers on that route) offer relief from walking up the steeper-than-stairs hills all throughout the city. Each collectivo or minibus has a designated Demis (Roussos) who, through the open window, bellows out the speed-dial list of stops on the route into the already heavily congested soundscape. It gets unbearable when the traffic has ground to a halt and there’s collectivos as far as the eye can see all competing for the same fares and the clamour of car horns and deranged destination incantations bounce off the walls and right into your brain. Another curious road rule is that any vehicle entering a roundabout has right of way – the complete opposite to what most people are used to. There are several Red Cow like roundabouts in La Paz which defy comprehension at rush hour.


Let me preface this next bit by saying we weren’t in the family way during the shooting of this next scene….. We had heard from several travellers we’d bumped into along the way that taking a bike trip down the World's Most Dangerous Road, or the Road of Death as it’s affectionately referred to locally, was an unmissable experience if visiting La Paz.

The Death Road - Photo borrowed from travelblog.org

It’s not just sensationalism to draw tourists either. Hundreds of people are killed on this stretch of road each year with packed passenger buses plummeting over the edge of the precipitous cliffs or cars and trucks colliding on the incredibly narrow corkscrew track which constitutes the roadway. There’s even a couple of cyclists a year (generally thrill seeking gringoes) killed while doing the very trip we’d be undertaking. Earlier in April a young Israeli guy died when his front fork snapped and he went over the side of the cliff at high speed at a particularly notorious bend. The company he went on the trip with are still doing business today under a different name and have accepted absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for his death. Ahh Bolivia.


Despite these horror stories, I think we were only in the city for 2 days when we had our trip booked such was our enthusiasm. We went with a company called Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking (there’s up 10 companies providing equipment and tours) who completely sold us on their excellent equipment and safety record. The bikes were top of the range Kona downhill mountain bikes, dual suspension monsters with hydraulic disc brakes sensitive to even the slightest little finger squeeze – worth about $3500 a piece. We’d need them as the ride was 64Kms of mostly downhill riding with some lung busting uphill stretches over some of the diciest terrain on a public road anywhere in the world. The leisurely spin would involve a descent from a starting point of 4700m to a couple of hundred metres above sea level and we were told to dress for ice, snow, rain, sun, mosquitoes and humidity – a pretty impossible task but given the altitude we’d be starting at and where we’d be finishing we were told to expect any imaginable combination of weather conditions over a very short space of time.

Me hair'll be ruined!

We were both pretty excited at the prospect but also well respectfully terrified. It was our first downhill biking adventure and we didn’t need to be told we’d chosen a pretty challenging cherry popper. M was initially pretty nervous but our guides were great, exceptionally good, with a detailed pre-ride safety and technique lecture and several hardware checks and shouts of encouragement all the way down. The ride started off on tarmac but quickly deteriorated into a narrow muddy subsiding gravel trail with apparently bottomless drops just at your elbow. The exhilaration induced by the breakneck speed you’re travelling and the ensuing massive rushes of adrenaline clouding your judgement and response times combined with the harum scarum loose gravelly surface, unexpected hairpins and scarily steep /drops into the rainforest hundreds of metres below made this trip …..special. The scenery was incredible aswell but you very rarely got a chance to enjoy it as you were generally concentrating really hard on staying on the bike. An interesting physics tip given to us by the guides was that a bike travelling downhill at speed will go where your eyes are looking. It's basic physics. And it’s scarily true. So throwing your head around in awe or even sneaking a peek at the scenery really wasn’t an option as you struggled to control the trajectory of your missile mount with minimal margin for error or adversity.


But what unbelievably great fun! It was like someone had managed to engineer a rollercoaster with a 60km downhill stretch. It was a jowl flapping, dramatic, teary eyed ride which we’ll never forget. At several stages it was impossible not to break out in the widest grin imaginable. We thankfully managed to complete it without any mishaps. There were however 2 nasty spills in our group alone which served to keep our minds focused and concentrated and us hopefully safe. M thoroughly enjoyed it aswell and although I told her I was hanging back to keep her company and protect her, there were times when I was right on the edge of my abilities barely touching the brakes travelling at an eye popping speed on a very volatile surface and she’d be right on my shoulder grinning maniacally to the bottom of the hill. Fair play to us. Another memorable highlight and proud achievement of our South American holidays. For obvious reasons I didn’t bring my camera on the trip but there’s a slideshow here and a photo here which will give you the gist (that's the road weaving its way down the mountain.)


And for some independent observer’s perspective here’s an excerpt from Lonely Planet: "Many agencies offering the La Cumbre to Coroico mountain bike plunge give travellers T-shirts plastered with: "I've survived the World's Most Dangerous Road." Keep in mind, the gravel road is just that: it's narrow (just over 3.2m wide) and has precipitous cliffs up to 900m high... and there's traffic. At the time of research, in the past 3 years eight people (higher figures sometimes quoted) have died doing the 64km trip (with a 3600m vertical drop) and readers have reported close encounters and nasty accidents. Most of these are due to little or no instruction and preparation, and poor quality mountain bikes (beware bogus rebranded bikes). In short, many agencies are less than ideal. Be aware of outfits which deflate prices - cost cutting can mean dodgy brakes, poor quality parts and literally, a deadly treadly. Multilingual guides are necessary for coaching and control. Ask agencies for proof of rescue equipment (rope rescue, harnesses, belays, oxygen), and a predeparture briefing. Ensure a quality company on this spectacular route before you freewheel your life away."


So without us really planning it, Bolivia - and La Paz in particular - has become a pretty important stop on our South American adventure. My comment about enjoying backpacking more in countries with depressed or backward economies notwithstanding, it’s an intriguing country where you regularly see sights that would turn your stomach, lift your soul or break your heart. As a people Bolivians are the most beautiful, kind and friendly we have ever experienced. Generally they have nothing more than a smile to offer but they do so unquestioningly, automatically but completely sincerely. Bolivians bring new meaning to the term beautiful people. They generally look like they’ve just woken up from an illicit sleep, puffy eyed, red cheeked and tousle haired. The kids are absolutely amazing – wandering the streets hand in hand in knitted woollen jump suits, funky sun hats up to their ears in shit but smiling greeting blue eyed gringos with the politest fascination and a shy “Ola”. They’re the most angelic, charming, self contained and happy kids in the world, watching the world go by as they bounce along on their mothers backs chewing a banana twice their size or sitting guarding the family’s streetside stall.

El Alto

I’m having a hard time trying to figure out how these still so impoverished and abandoned. Its probably just ignorance or naivety on my part but it’s the 21st century and these people are still living hand to mouth in subsistence conditions where you wouldn’t put animals. Bolivia is the second most corrupt country in the world (Pedro, our miner guide, delivered the deadpan punchline that he was personally working on getting Bolivia to the top of the list) and this is apparently the prime cause of the people’s suffering. The top 2% of the population, the rich non indigenous white colonial descendent population, govern and control with only their own financial interests at heart leaving the indigenous population uneducated and lacking even the most basic infrastructure.

My iPad

An eye opening example of this was the New Road, the road which was to replace the World's Most Dangerous Road for heavy traffic, which was just opened in December. It took 12 years to build and has been opened 5 months and already it's crumbling. Stretches of the road were built over landslides without even the most basic engineering input. Holding walls themselves are crumbling onto the road causing a serious hazard in themselves. Apparently massive budget overruns and corner cutting took place with the majority of the funding for the road pocketed by the corrupt officials and used for the usual palatial mansions with swimming pools filled with hookers and cocaine.

Waiting for the bus to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca

On a lighter note, the mannequin spotting got completely out of hand in La Paz. There was also some impressive graffiti and stencil art aswell which I didn't expect. I'll put together a post soon dedicated exclusively to the most tragic mannequins in distress we experienced on our travels. The graffiti photos would make up a whole post on their own as well. But anyways, stay tuned for the wrap up in Rio, how we got there and the culture shock of returning home.