Duty-free love

I have read some of "Marching Powder" a book about a drug dealer imprisoned in a notorious prison in La Paz, Bolivia, but can´t remember ever actually thinking of La Paz as a real place. It has been the same for many of the legendary sites we have been to on this trip. The Andes: I knew they were there and were substantial enough for word to have reached us of their existence, but haven't spent a moment actually considering what they might be like. They are so extraordinary that this feels like a tremendous failure.

Anyway, La Paz is pretty great, and has been placed on the list of cities we could live in if we decided to return to do volunteer work or something in the future. The city centre is laid out on a valley floor with the suburbs climbing the slopes around. As the houses get higher and more precariously perched the people get poorer. When people do have money they can buy nearly anything anywhere in town; just about the whole city is an open air market. Stalls line every street and it seems that there is some city legislation that demands that every fourth stall sell very bland hamburgers and hot dogs, and that every person buy at least one a day.

We probably didn't maximise our La Paz experience due to travel fatigue and the sniffles. We had a nice room and when stressed (which is all the time on La Paz's frenetic streets) we retreated to watch Friends and other crap on cable. We did manage to walk the hilly streets a little to take in the dried llama foetuses available in the witches market and to consider purchasing a wheelbarrow full of strawberries. We dined on magnificent spicy soup with pork chop and crackling ($1.60 each) at a little corner food stall where an old lady with an extraordinarily characterful face told us she had been working for fifty years. When we told she and her daughter that we were from Australia they looked very confused and didn't even understand when we mimicked kangaroos, which was extraordinary as every other Bolivian exclaimed "Kangaroos!" whenever we said we were from Australia.

While Mel struggled with the sniffles I rode a bike down the world´s most dangerous road. It isn´t that dangerous anymore as there is hardly any traffic thanks to a new road through the same area, but at some points it is so slim and rutted and adjacent to dizzying precipices that it is hard to understand how a sane person would undertake to drive something as large as a car down there. Apparently several buses have plunged off the edges and there were even a few smaller buses on it this day; even without traffic this seems crazy. I was with a mixed group of Israelis, Australians and Brits, and was one of the slowest. The Israelis in particular zoomed down at reckless speed. Our guides were young Brits, and were probably not as responsible as they could have been. When an Irishman came down with a flat tyre the guide asked if he was alright riding on his own, then said "Fuck him then" and led the rest of us away while the tyre was being repaired.

At the bottom we had lunch and the Israelis sat with the only girls in the group while most of the rest of the boys sat together. Many at our table took the opportunity to comment on their negative experiences with Israelis while travelling, and each followed the other in telling tales bagging Israelis and stopping just short of saying they wished Israelis would never travel. These pricks (the baggers, not the Israelis) then accepted with straight faces the extremely warm regards that one of the Israeli boys left them with after we returned to La Paz. I kind of hope he overheard the lunch comments and if so I applaud his response.

Our last night in La Paz was spent dining with Xavier and Florencia, a Belgin-Argentinian love affair that was sparked in the Buenos Aires airport duty free shop (the cigar bar, to be precise) several years before and has been surviving on brief trans-Atlantic visits since. We drank a bottle of Bolivian wine (the guide book says Bolivian wine is "exceptional"; the author has clearly invested heavily in the industry) and I poured the last of it into Xavier´s glass, a sign, he said, that he would be married within a year. Florencia was thrilled.