You don't need to spend a lot of time in La Paz to learn that this is the city of "highest": it has the highest commercial airport in the world, the highest golf course in the world, the highest skiing slope in the world and, presumably, many other "highest" records. Ironically, the only undeserved title is the one most people know it for, since, as I said before, Sucre is the actual capital of Bolivia.
No matter how you arrive in La Paz, by plane or ground transportation, your first view of the city will be from above. And it is a spectacular one, since La Paz is located at the bottom of a canyon in the Bolivian Altiplano. Spaniards chose this site to protect it from the winds and cold temperatures of the high plane.
I must say that La Paz is not really a city, but a huge street market surrounded by buildings. It's almost impossible to find a piece of sidewalk where nobody is selling anything. You can buy deliciusly cheap food (salteñas and fruit salads were my favorite), all types of Indian handycrafs, pirate CDs and DVDs, drinks, calculators, clothes,... just anything that you can think of. There are no supermarkets there, but what's the need when the city itself is one of the world's biggest open air markets.
One of my favorite spots in La Paz is the Pampahasi viewpoint, where you get a spectacular view of the whole city. Also worth visiting is the impressive "Valle de la Luna" (yeap, another one), where you can walk between amazing peaks strangly shaped by the rain and water. And not to be missed either is the Coca Museum, where I learned a lot of interesting facts about this controversial veggie (among other things, Coca Cola still uses nowadays about 240 tons of coca leaves for its famous drink, although just for flavoring purposes).
Visiting the world's highest skiing slope, Chacaltaya, was another great trip. Not only I got a spectacular view of La Paz, most of the peaks of the "Cordillera Real", lake Titicaca and quite a few colorful lagoons, but it was probably the easiest (and fastest way) of climbing a 5,488 m-high mountain, since the bus droped me off at 5,300.
However, if you think walking the remaining 188m was a piece of cake, think again. Walking up at that altitude is a good challenge and we had to stop every 10m or so to recover our breath. One of the girls in our group suffered high-altitude sickness and had to be taken down to be administered oxygen. So given these "favorable" conditions, I found truly mind-blogging that anyone would attempt skiing at this height, specially considering that the slope has no mechanical lift and you have to walk up, in the snow, carrying your skies and all your gear. In other words, you must really, really, really love the sport to go skiing in La Paz :)
We also decided to visit the Tihuanaco ruins, claimed to be the most important ones in Bolivia as they were the main site of the pre-Incan Tihuanaco society. I must confess that I found them quite deceptioning, since there is very little to see (most of it is underground, waiting to be excavated) and even that seems to have suffered heavy reconstruction.
Additionally, we got the feeling (and this applies to most guided visits of Incan and pre-Incan sites in the continent) that the information we were given was little more than guesswork, specially considering that these cultures had no writing and it's virtualy impossible to uncover most of their secrets. Most guides seem obsessed with making these societies look much more evolved than they actually were, and quite frequently you are giving information that is plainly false. During this tour, for example, our guide tried to convince us that 48 little soldiers on one wall together with 4 other soldiers on another wall represented the 52 weeks of the year. But how the Tihuanacos discovered the 7-day week concept created by the Romans remains a mystery for all of us (including our guide).
But my favorite activity in La Paz was the breath-taking downhill bicycle ride to Coroico, certainly one of the most exciting things I've done in this whole trip. Riding a state-of-the-art bicycle (double hydraulic disc-brakes) and descending 3,600 m in only 64 km along a narrow, bumpy (and ofter muddy) dirt road with vertical drops of up to 1,000 m, enjoying spectacular views of green rain-forest valleys and peaks is an experience hard to match.
This road was declared in 1994 "The World's Most Dangerous Road" by the World Bank, and there's a reason for it. There are dozens of fatal accidents every year (our guide told us one every 2 weeks) and all the crosses placed along the road are a disturbing and constant reminder of how many people have lost their lives here. The main cause for that tragic record is that the road is extremely narrow (at some points I don't think it's wider than 3m) and land-slides on the cliff-side are frequent due to the various waterfalls that drop on the road. In fact, it's the only road in Bolivia where you drive on the left, so drivers can see how close the are to the cliff when they are maneuvering to avoid on-coming traffic.
Unfortunately, when we rode down the road it was raining and foggy, so we could't enjoy the magnificent views of the cliffs. Although you could also say that luckily, it was raining and foggy and we could not see the drops of the cliffs! Anyway, that made it even more fun, riding on the mudd, crossing rivers and controlling the bike sliding on the turns. Spectacular!
After that thrilling experience we decided to relax for a couple days at the wonderful hotel Esmeralda at Coroico, escaping from the cold of the heights for the first time in many weeks and enjoying the swimming-pool, the sauna (well, I didn't get to use it but it was there) and the beautiful views of the valleys. That was without a doubt the best place I've slept in the whole trip, and also the best value-for-money (3,5 euros per night is a true bargain).
We intended to take a 10-hour jeep trip from there to the jungle, but unfortunately the roads where being blocked by demonstrators and when the blockade was finally over, a bridge collapsed. Ten people died the day before trying to cross through the river in a truck, so we had no alternative but to go up to La Paz by bus (on the most dangerous road in the world, something I wanted to avoid by all means) and then fly to the jungle. So if you think going down this road on a bike was scary, I cannot describe what the return trip was like on a bus almost as wide as the entire road. On the bicycle you go as fast and as close to the cliff as you want (or as the oncoming traffic lets you), but in a bus you are no longer in control (I'm affraid not even the driver was in control all time). And this time there was no fog to hide the drop.
I was sitting at a window on the cliff side and I can tell you that many times, when I looked out the window, I could see the vertical drop, but not the road or where the drop ended. That was, without a doubt, the "most dangerous ride of my trip".
No comments:
Post a Comment