Day 11: La Paz, in which I reach for the skies and land on the moon
La Paz was a lot, for this country mouse. To be honest, half an hour of it’s crazy chaotic wonderfulness would probably have lasted me a lifetime, but we had a whole full day here so I joined the rest of the group for a city tour.
We began our journey with a fight through traffic, and then we soared free on the city’s highly regarded cable car system. Pitched as an alternative to a subway system, these various lines, each assigned a colour, allow rapid transit between various key points in the city.
With the stations between impeccably clean and shiny, with negligable queues to get into each cable car, I was quickly left wondering whether the system was truly used by the citizens of the city as opposed to just being geared up for tourists, but I was given to understand that it was much busier as peaks times of the day.
The high vantage point also gave us opportunity to see the vast contrasts in housing standards across even small numbers of streets. One moment, we’d be passing over a street of ramshackle apartment buildings, the next glass-fronted mansions nestled on the top of the hill.
After the cable cars and a lunch of an empanada-like creation called a saltena, we were taken to see the ‘Valley of the Moon’, which I didn’t think looked a whole lot like the moon, but Neil Armstrong was the one to give it its original name so I will let him be the judge. It was definitely worth the trip, with strange stalagmite-like rock formations and craters, plus views over a slightly different part of La Paz, complete with gold course.
On the way back from the moon, our mini-bus stopped at an intersection and was approached by a small child selling lollypops from a zanily-coloured multipack bag, designed for populating party bags and here being used by a child to earn small change that back in the UK wouldn’t even buy a sandwich. Our driver bought one, and I’ll never know if he did it out of charity or if he really wanted the candy. We drove on towards our hotel, and left the child to approach the next vehicle that came along.
Leave a Reply