Bolivia

When you arrive in La Paz, you get a beautiful view on the city from 'El Alto'. The city is built in layers, poor people (used to) live high up and rich people down. With an altitude of 3,660 meters, La Paz is said to be the highest capital in the world. The only problem though is that Sucre is the constitutional capital of Bolivia, not La Paz. Like the Dutch, Libian and South-African governments, the Bolivian government is not seated in the capital, that is why there is so much confusion. La Paz is the biggest Bolivian city though, with about 1.4 million people. It is a very busy and noisy city, a lot of traffic and polution, but there is a lot to do and see, too.

Walking along the many markets is a joy for the eyes, ears and the nose. The mercado negro is probably the most famous one, but the bit I have seen of it, I did not like very much. Go out and explore the markets you bump into by accident, they are much more interesting than the clothes on mercado negro. A must see is the Mercado de las Brujas, the witches market, where you can buy amulets, potions, good luck goodies, llama foetuses etc. Close to this market, there is a whole street with souvenir shops, for those out for buying souvenirs. Take a walk along the main streets of La Paz as well, they are crowded with people, traffic and stalls, but it is all very interesting to see. The amount of illegal cd's you can buy here is incredible, I have found one shop where legal copies can be bought. Plaza Murillo is without any doubt the most beautiful square in the city and has La Paz's cathedral as well as el Palacio del Gobierno in it.

A nice half-day trip away from the city's noise is to the Valle de la Luna, public buses take you there in about an hour. It is a bit of a tourist trap although the moonlandscape is amazing. The surroundings are very beautiful and inviting for a walk back towards La Paz. Remember you can stop the buses wherever you want. The Valle de la Luna is also very close to La Paz`s zoo and to the Muela del Diablo (the devil's molar), both of which Eva and I did not go to visit.
Another attraction is San Pedro's prison, a village in itself. The prison doors are open and San Pedro has shops, restaurants and churches in it hence rich prisoners do not have so much of a bad life.

A must when you are in La Paz is the Careterra de la muerte, a 70 km-long mountainbike downhill-track that takes you from the very cold La Cumbre, at an altitude of 4,700 meters, to the tropical Coroico, 3,500 meters down. The beginning is all asphalt and you can reach speeds up to 70 km/h without pedaling! Than after an hour or two, the real carretera de la muerta starts, no asphalt any more, just a small path with a ravine of up to 700 meters going straight down at the side! There is quite some trucks, buses and cars you have to overtake on the death road, so it is all very exciting. The road was chosen the most dangerous one in the world because on average, there are 26 vehicles going down every year, which makes an average of one every second week! Over the eight years travel agencies have been running mountainbike-tours down the Careterra de la Muerta, eight people have died doing it, six tourists and two guides. In our group, three out of five people fell and one of them was unlucky enough to fall down on the asphalt at high speed, so he had to be taken back to La Paz to get his chin stitched. The other two got away with only some scratches.
But it is all well worth it. The landscapes are amazing and the adrenaline rush is wicked. After you have made it down, a van takes you up half an hour and takes you to a hotel where you are served a buffet. Unfortunately, I had had a very bad diarrhoea for the first time this trip the nighth before, but after about seven tablets of imodium in the morning, I made it down, where the stomach ache started again. The four hours by van back to La Paz, doing the Death Road the other way around, were terrible, I was in pain and had to stop the van two times to flee into the bushes.
The agency I booked with was very good, it is called X-treme downhill.

Hasta luego, amigos

The Joker group with about twelve Belgian people we kept on meeting in Peru provided me with a travel companion after Thomas had left. Eva, a lovely girl from Mortsel (near Antwerp) wanted to travel to Bolivia, too, so when we met again at Machu Picchu, we decided to travel to Copacabana together.
Copacabana is a little city at the Bolivian side of the Lago Titicaca, eight kilometers passed the Peruvian border. It is a perfect basis to do a day trip to the beautiful Isla del Sol. If you go there, take the boat to the north of the island in the morning, do the lovely eight-kilometer-walk to the south and take the boat back from there. Make sure you walk up the hill in Copacabana, too, it provides a gorgeous view on Lago Titicaca and over Copa, it is perfect to see the sunset. Copa has an impressive cathedral worth visiting and it has quite a few good restaurants where you can sit outside in a nice garden under the ever present sun. Try the 'Pico Macho', a traditional dish with spicey beef, salchicha (pork sausage), paprika and of course, chips. Order a glass of api to go with it, it is a typical Bolivian drink made from brown maize. You can take a Paqueño to go with it, too, it is a tasty Bolivian beer but there might be some misunderstandings if you ask for a Pequeño grande. The market is worth paying a visit, just to see how they sell meet, uncooled of course with tons of flies circling around, or to buy some fruits.
Eva and me stayed overnight in the south of Isla del Sol, at Don Thomas. You get a room full of flies, there is no water, nore is there electricity and the toilet, well the hole with a plank with a hole in it over it, was overfull. But we only paid 6 bolivianos (0.6 euros) and had a good night's sleep. Next day, we wanted to walk to the litlle port on the south of the island, but we miscalculated a bit and ended up having to climb rocks and doing dangerous things as the coast line was getting rockier and rockier and steaper and steaper. Then to make it even worse, it started hailing heavily and fortunately Eva managed to get a fishing boat to get over to the shore and pick us up. The port seemed to be still very far and we would never have gotten there without walking the whole way back because further on, it was impossible to walk. Quite a good adventure that was, the rowing boat back to the port.
The colectivos (little white vans for public transport) from Copacabana to La Paz do not seem to be very safe as there are several reports of tourists getting robbed on them or even kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to give their credit card's pinnumber. So, you would better take the tourist bus to La Paz, it is only 10 bolivianos (1 euro) more expensive and it is safe. There is signs up warning you for these incidents in several tourist places in Copa as well as in La Paz.