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Other entries in La Paz

Guerra y Paz

It's just like this ordinary mountain road and then whoah! Like an ice-cream scoop out of the dust, there she lies, Bolivia's capital in all but some minor technical detail, and her 1.5 million inhabitants, sprawled across this great crater. The bus was moving too much to get a decent shot of it, but I'll try again next week.

The road here was broken by a brief stop at a strait in the lake, where for some inevident reason we all (once again, some canny locals wangled an exemption) were asked to descend, and take a small dinghy across, while the bus was ferried across separately. I don't need to mention that there was a charge for the boat but feel obliged to point out the curious presence of a couple of policemen checking for passports, at the beginning of the crossing. This is a little like being checked at the ha'penny bridge, before venturing into the wilds of Northside Dublin, and none-too-oddly the brown-faced people were not required to provide a document allowing them to travel from one part of their country to another, nor were they obliged to pay the ferryman. The hapless English pair whose passports were with the rest of their belongings on the now-departed bus found themselves in somewhat of a pickle, but gladly for all concerned it was the kind of pickle that sweetened with a crisp twenty-boliviano note, and passage was assured. The resultant five-minute delay was enough for our heroic driver to make a clean getaway on the other side and we watched bemused as he pootled up the road on the way to Bolivia, seeing us in his wake, noticing the twenty-odd new free spaces on his creaky bus but caring not a whit for our plight. Luckily, the machine's capacity for vertical movement was somewhat short of that of a millipede and we caught him, running, and threw ourselves into the bus. There were some exchanges of dialogue, most of which would not be broadcast on Channel 4 after the watershed, but the most comical was surely the assertion that our team of transporters was on a tight schedule and had to be in La Paz at a certain time. Bus and boat schedules in Bolivia are generally given with a margin of error of several days, so the involuntary witticism served to defuse the situation somewhat. That and a few kicks to the door.

Finding a place to stay proved something of a challenge, and we spent a couple of hours, accompanid by two new friends, vainly searching up and down the sharply sloping streets of this cloud-riding metropolis, weaving amongst the insane traffic and avoiding the sinister pleas of the bebalaclavaed shoeshiners - the city is, in a word, filthy, and the ski-masks must offer some mild reprieve from the permanent gusts of coal-fire smoke that pour from the aeons-old buses traversing the city. We eventually found refuge in a budget hostel one of the higher streets in the north of the city, inaccessible to non-Olympic athletes and unmotorised transport. For less than two euros a night we had a gaily-decorated room, hot showers, kitchen use and stroking privileges for a pair of cats and four kittens. Minutes after we arrived, we were joined by our Chilean mates who had done an about face at the bus terminal, en route to Arequipa, and come to La Paz, in time for Carnaval.

Oruro, three hours south, is alleged to be South America's best effort at Carnaval, outside of Brazil. Its population triples for the three days around the main event, the Diablada procession on the Saturday before Mardi Gras. We would like to have gone, but the only available accommodation was a cement floor in a primary school and, not having sleeping bags, we had to give up after a few day's searching and resign ourselves to the festivities of La Paz.

Before the main event, we had a few days to acclimatise and re-encounter old friends. Flora was still knocking about, and so we met up for the third time in as many countries. More Chileans and Juan from Argentina completed the picture, and many a Frenchman was added to the circle over time. The food in Bolivia has a lousy reputation, but we found that with a little searching, some luck and the odd tip we could eat delicious meals for a song (actually, for a small amount of money, as my singing wouldn't earn me a cornflake in a Kellog's factory). A half leg of roast lamb, spicy and crispy on the outside, juicy and delicious on the inside, with a field of salad runs to a euro twenty, and a spicy Lebanese platter in a semi-posh eatery yields two gorgings for under four nicker. Having supped at odd soups and devoured trout at the market, we even treated ourselves to an upmarket Bolivian place, with a gut-stuffing entree of tacos with mad fillings and a main course of llama (in steak form, or cooked, pot-roast style until it falls into little stringy pieces), and two glasses of wine leaving change from a tenner. There's also a fried chicken place every ten metres, if you're stuck.

Carnaval is in full swing now and for two days we've been mixing it with the kids, big 'uns and grannies as the streets turn to all-out war, with pistols, balloons and cans of foam the means to soak your neighbour to within an inch of his life. No place is safe as the missiles come from atop lorries and rooftops, from under coats and between cars, from barely-walking toddlers and old dudes with similar problems of articulation. It's a joy to behold, at least until day two or three, when you just want to get to the frigging shop without catching pneumonia in this rapidly changing climate, and an unimaginable sight for stuffy Europe, where barons and MDs would never mix with the common folk to lob water-bombs through bus windows. As night drew in, we retreated to the apparent safety of a small bar, and wet our whistles, possibly the only dry bits left. A group of lawyers was seated at the table next to us and we got talking to them (or slurring, in a couple of cases), then got soaking with them, as the guns came out and the pub exploded in a riot of bursting bubbles, squirting bottles and precious beer poured over unexpecting heads. As the tide rose, we made good our escape to the streets, and danced until exhaustion (not a very long time this high up) before din-dins and beddie-byes.

Since I lost the camera cable somewhere in Cuzco it's a bit of a nuisance, and an unwanted expense to transfer photos, first to CD, then via el web, so pictoral accompaniments may be in short supply until I bite the bullet and buy a new one, or a smart card reader, or even find a cybercafe with such a thing - for some bizarre reason, only about one in ten places have CDROM drives, though all offer fast PCs, broadband access and big, shiny monitors. Today's excursion, then, to the Valley of the Moon, will have to be imagined, for now, in the form of narrow, sandstone protrusions of odd forms soaring up from a valley ridden with cacti and viscachas - a kind of squirrel-rabbit or squabbit, with a backdrop of russet mountains lining the way to La Paz, nestled under the snowy peak of Mount Illimani. Imagine a reddish-greenish-whitish-brownish array of quaint geometric forms and you're half-way there.

And so, tomorrow, we head northwards, to the jungle, and the town of Rurrenabaque, after a short stop in the yuppie haven of Coroico (swimming pools and saunas included in the bank-busting three-dollar lodgings), reached via the 3000 metre descent over eighty kilometres of The World's Most Dangerous Road (TM).

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