So La Paz was a bit of a blur. Our hostel had a bar and at that bar you would witness things that would make the old man from Father Ted cringe.
One particular man was wearing a Hello Kittie onesie and while I was innocently trying to charge my phone over breakfast one morning, asked me in a stench of booze, what part of Australia I was from. I laughed as someone had thought I was Israeli the night before. I would be Belgian the following night. This guy had been up all night and when asked if he had been to bed, replied that he didn't know. We saw him later that day, still pissed and stinking and AGAIN the next morning looking like DEATH but still drunk. That same morning we saw people ordering shots and ciders at 9.30am. That place made us feel like nuns.
We walked, out of breath and hungover, to San Pedro prison and sat in the square looking at it and at the queue of women waiting to get in to see their men. We noticed the policemen and Ken pointed out their really old school guns hanging from their belts and decided those guns "are the ones that really hurt". Gold.
Then we went to the witches market. It took for ever to find because the map sucked and we were hungover and out of breath and our flip flops kept coming off. It had weird dried dead baby llamas hanging up and potions for every ailment including loads of Viagra to make you "like the bull".
We tried to visit the coca museum but it was all Spanish text and for 30bs we are not that advanced so we came out again.
The Bolivian women wear bowler hats perched on top of their head but they are slightly too small so they have no purchase on the head by being wedged on as we would wear them, no, they are BALANCED. We spent many a minute staring at them trying to fathom the secret of how they stay on (Velcro?) but came to the conclusion that it's pure skill. We call them the Bolivian hat balancers (BHBs). They probably take their advanced BHB exam at the end of May. The guys get to wear baseball caps. The women are so softly spoken and gentle and mostly have no teeth.
Walking back from the witches market we saw a clean, white jaw bone on the floor in the street. Hopefully animal!
We went to the mad opening party of a new hostel which involved shoulder rides and dancing on the bar.
Then we cycled death road. I did it on two hours sleep because all the red bull from the godforsaken blood bombs kept me up. The bikes had suuuper sensitive breaks (we paid for the best company, no fucking about) and we received many warnings about going over the handlebars. We bombed it down, prewarned about upcoming sections of road, called stuff like "collarbone alley" because it claims so many collarbones!
We went to a monkey sanctuary at the bottom where 150 monkeys were roaming free and had a little zoology lesson which was lovely, but Kerri's legs got eaten alive by sand flies.
On the way back up in the minivan, our guide told us that Klaus Barbie (Hans from inglorious bastards) moved to live on death road in hiding after murdering 6 thousand in WW2. He also told us about many of the fatalities and casualties - which was nice to be told about after rather than before and we then started noticing all the crosses and memorials by the side of the road. At it's peak the road claimed 300 lives a year, averaging one a day.
In conclusion, we concluded that La paz is a shit hole but a good shit hole.
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