La Paz

In my mind, Bolivia is about as far into South America as you can get.  It's landlocked, isolated and poor, with an extreme landscape of forbidding mountains, enormous deserts, the freezing Altiplano, and a big chunk of the Amazon rainforest.  Well over 60% of the population is indigenous, many of whom continue to wear traditioal clothes everyday.

La Paz, the capital, is a striking place, if not an altogether pleasant one.  The location is stunning - it started out along a riverbank at the bottom of a valley surrounded by high steep walls.  Over time, the city expanded up and over the cliff walls and kept going.  Unlike a lot of cities, in La Paz, the wealthiest parts are the lowest ones - presumably due to the significant difference in climate, with some 2000' variation from the bottom to the top.  The poorer areas are near the top or over the tops of the hills.  We've had the opportunity to go up and down several times, and the views over the city are amazing, particularly when it is clear enough to see the snow capped peaks just beyond the city.

Even the wealthier, lower parts of the city, including where we are staying, have a sort of worn-out 1970's feel to them.  Stunning location aside, it would be hard to call La Paz a beautiful city - many buildings are run down or half-finished, there's a lot of garbage and very little green space.  And there's not all that much to do here, so we're keeping it pretty short, using it as a rest stop on our way to the Salar de Uyuni, the salt flats in southern Bolivia.  We've decided to give the typical hostels a rest, and are staying in nicer digs than usual here, a 2 bedroom hotel suite, which is a nice change.

Today, we went on a very good walking tour that covered most of what I wanted to see in four hours - the small colonial center, the San Pedro prison where foreigners used to come and go on tours, some lasting days (interesting to me because I've just finished Marching Powder, a prison memoir by an English drug smuggler who spent five years there in the 90s), and the markets of El Alto, the city beyond the top of the cliffs.  The section of the market where you can buy all sorts of materials for witchcraft and offerings was particularly interesting - llama and donkey fetuses, strange potions, blocks of sugar shaped like money, and the like.  Of all the city tours we've taken in South America - Santiago, Valparaiso, Lima - this was my favorite.  

Here's a shot of Oscar feeding the pigeons near the Presidential Palace.  If you have food, they will come up and stand all over you.

But the real highlight of our visit was last night, when we went to El Alto to see the "Cholitas Luchadoras" or Cholita wrestling.  From the start, this sounded odd.  Cholitas, indigenous women in traditional big skirts, braids and bowler hats, matching off against each other in a WWF style wrestling competition.  Well...that's exactly what it was.  Good guys (technicas), bad guys (rudas), sneaky biased referees, badly coreographed fights that often spilled into the audience.  The first fight we saw ended when the technica set the rudo's pants on fire and he ran through the audience to put them out.  Crazy.  Apparently it started off as a local women's empowerment thing, and has since grown to become an offbeat tourist attraction (maybe half the crowd was tourists).  Having seen it, I don't understand it any better, and I'm not likely to return home a professional wrestling fan, but we definitely had a good time.  (Check out Oscar's more detailed write-up of the action here.)

We're off tomorrow for Uyuni - 5am pickup for the airport.  So this afternoon is devoted to catching up on work, blogs and naps.