Shaken but stirred

The journey to La Paz is incredibly arduous, with the bus taking similar dessert terrain routes we had been used to in the specialised 4x4s on the Salar de Uyuni. The uneven surface shakes the bus horrifically for most of the journey and seemingly lasting for an agonising age. Emergency exits regularly pop open and the attendants batten down the hatches, knowing how rough the ride will be. Dinner is served quickly to limit potential damage struck by airborne food, and TV’s are stowed away for fear of them shaking themselves to bits. Thankfully this ends a short loop of Bon Jovi music videos inflicting pain on the busload of passengers. I somehow manage to scrape a healthy semblance of sleep but Lucy does less well.

As the sun rises, we watch the sprawling city wide, mass markets being worked by the mostly rotund Bolivian Cholita ladies. The ladies wear traditional, layered (sometimes up to ten/eleven items deep), brown, shawl based clothing complete with brightly coloured hood/nap sack/pouched/backpacks around their necks. Sometimes the hoods contain their wares but more commonly contain one or two children wrapped up snug on their mother’s backs. To top off the ensemble they wear bowler hats, not seen on western heads for a while (excluding desperate hipsters keen to impress).

The story goes the bowler hats were imported at the height of the their fashion in the early 20th century, with overkeen entrepreneurs making a guess at head sizes based upon the small height of Bolivian men. Unfortunately, Bolivian men have disproportionately big heads, leading to large stockpiles of unsold bowlers. Crucially, the smaller headed Cholita ladies were told the hats were the latest fashion in London and Paris, leading to the mass adoption of the bowler in Bolivian Cholitas.

Bolivian women will initially signal to potential suitors by having their tiny bowler hat at a jaunty angle. The angle will dictate how “up for it” they actually are. It’s a bit like the traffic light system at cheesy student club nights. A Well jaunty angle equals “well up for it”.

Bolivian men like a rounded calf and as the final part of the courting ritual, a Cholita will lift her skirt to expose the roundness of her lower leg. This shows to a Bolivian man her suitability to work by the level of “sturdyness”, harking back to days of farm work before the transition into the city.
“Sorry, skinny calves won’t get those fields ploughed love. Next!” Said a Bolivian man, ages ago.

On this occasion there seem to be very few Bolivian men around. Those that are present seem to be casually observing from a distance with ninety nine percent of the stalls being tended by the Cholitas. Here, the men eat ice cream and watch the work happen.

La Paz has no bus station as such, and the drop off point is hectic and congested with cars and people (pavements are thin, forcing pedestrians to use roads, exacerbating the situation) We retrieve our backpacks from the baggage attendant and walk the short distance towards our hostel. On the way, the overused sound of cars honking horns becomes the ambient (read irritating) noise of the Bolivian capital. A Bolivian honk is not only delivered to chastise, but also to indicate the presence of the driver to other road users including pedestrians. Being an overly congested city, with little in the way of traffic management, the noise is constant (Roundabouts are scary places especially in nail biting periods of rush hour, cars packed bumper to bumper leaving millimeters between).

We had booked the Adventurebrew hostel on the recommendation of the hostelworld website. The hostel was cheap, in a central location and came with lots of party facilities. Also a free beer every day, a beer spa (what the heck is a beer spa? I have no idea, but it sounds INCREDIBLE!) We turn up to the hostel looking forward to resting after the mucho bumpy ride from the Salar de Uyuni. The receptionist shows us to our room which actually has an overwhelming stench of Bolivian drainage included for free. Also included in the price is an intermittent, scalding hot/icy blast shower cycle and a picturesque view of the busiest T-junction in La Paz. With Bolivian traffic comes Bolivian honking. The windows protect our ears from little and we have to make a path of least resistance, sense decision. Do we endure the smell and put up with the noise or vice versa? Which sense do we hate the most?

This being the tenth anniversary of mine and Lucy’s lips locking, we decide neither. We had stayed in contact with the Aussie girls who facebooked how nice their hostel was and we check out of the Adventurebrew hostel before fully checking in, following them to the Cruz de los Andes hostel.

We meet up with the girls in the hostel who greet us with warm smiles and fresh insults which we return with glee. The hostel itself is gloriously clean with a shower to rival Igazu falls in the rainy season.

There is a free red cap walking tour around the city of la Paz. Alongside the Aussie nurses we walk to San Pedro plaza, the meeting point for the tour. The guides work by tips, so work hard to entertain us with their knowledge of the crazy capital. We meet our host Mauricio who is a good natured, exceedingly camp man. Dark skinned, with the appearance of diverse European heritage, and bleached frizzy blond hair, Mauricio isn’t like other Bolivian men.

Mauricio starts the tour by telling us about the notorious San Pedro prison. Rife with contradiction, the prison largely exists outside of governmental control (they only actively monitor entrance and exit points, plus payment of the guards). The prison exists as it’s own city with complex class systems and ironically, severe punishments for wrongdoings committed within the confines of the walls (honour amongst thieves acting as judge and jury). Classes are allocated by crimes committed on the outside of the walls, so in this system, child abuse or paedophilia crimes would put you in the lowest class area with fewer amenities. On the opposite end of the scale, fraudulent or non violent crimes open your opportunities to the higher class neighbourhoods. For those with money you can pay your way into semi permanent locations with jacuzzis and hot tubs. Some inmates build extra rooms to incorporate their families which are allowed to move into the prison. When their incarcerated stretch is done and they exit the prison walls, they are permitted by the system to charge rent for the room that they built to new inmates. Coincidentally, this slightly eases the overcrowding as the prison, currently holding two and a half thousand people was only designed to house four hundred.

Mobile smartphones are commonly smuggled into the prison and the inmates can leach the wifi from the neighbouring hotel in San Pedro square. Illustrious crime kingpins can instruct their minions to continue their bidding through Facebook.

The police in Bolivia are famously also prone to corruption and bribery, sometimes being bought to aid in car kidnapping schemes run by inmates. If your car gets kidnapped in Bolivia, your best bet is to pay up straight away. Thirty thousand Bolivianos smuggled into the San Pedro prison will buy you your car intact, untouched and well looked after. Failure to produce the money or reporting to the police either doubles the price or results in a phone call from the prison discussing how members of your family are being followed by particularly nefarious members of crime gangs.

We walk onwards through the food markets in which I can honestly say I have never seen so much commerce in my life. Foods of every shape and colour line the street stalls. Bolivia has over four hundred varieties of potatoes and I think we see most of them through the tens of thousands of stalls in La Paz.

The bustle increases as our large group shuffles in an amorphous line through the streets. We are instructed not to take pictures as the Cholitas can get pretty nasty, some hiding knives under their many layers of clothing (Cholita wrestling is also taken very seriously here). Lucy takes some stealthy photos along the way but the Cholitas are experts in spotting a sneaky snapper, covering their own or children’s faces with a bowler hat close to hand. We feel guilty and stop taking photos of them.

As part of their faith and traditions, Bolivian people also hold onto their superstitions. La Paz has a witch doctor’s market stocked with some highly questionable cures, potions and love spells (that’s right, spells) for a multitude of ailments and situations that may arise. The street we pass through is packed with shops selling mostly unidentifiable pieces of animals and plants to those that need it.

Very identifiable dried Llama foetuses hang from shop doorways for use in gifts to Mama pacha (Mother Earth) when a new building is constructed. The llama is used in a ritual to bless the earth that is being built upon and is buried in the foundations to promote good luck and stability of the building. Ritualistic practices extend further and mystic shamen are employed to conduct them.

Scarily, Mauricio then explains on large constructions such as hotels or mansions, a bigger sacrifice is needed. He teases us by making us guess what the animal might be. “Think more evolved than a monkey” says Mauricio. Eventually the horrifying penny drops and it becomes clear he is talking about human sacrifice. As a gift to the earth, homeless people or other unfortunates (possibly hedonistic travellers) are lured to their deaths by high percentage alcohol. The message for tourists is clear, do not accept shots from strange Bolivan men or you may be buried alive in the foundations of a Bolivian Hilton in a superstitious ritual. Our mouths fall agape.

Another story goes in the way that Mcdonald’s failed to make their mark in Bolivia. After building the restaurants the Bolivian people soon realised the prices that they were charging were the relative equivalent of a high class steak (would you rather have steak or a Mcdonald’s burger?). Added to this was the insistence to import potatoes for fries into the country with (aforementioned on this page already) four hundred varieties. Needless to say McDonald’s didn’t have a viable business plan, shut up shop and went home.

La Paz and Bolivia have a way of growing on you. Perhaps as travellers we found our groove there, maybe finally getting used to the chaotic lifestyles of the cities of South America. Perhaps because we operated in a larger group alongside the Adeladian Aussie nurses, feeling more confident in ourselves. Perhaps because we felt tall in comparison with Bolivian men and women. The slight lawlessness and way of life feels exciting to experience but also makes you appreciate the “order” of things back home. It’s a privilege to be able to step between the two worlds and survive relatively unscathed.

I say relatively unscathed, as the next day we book our places to ride the Bolivian death road. “The most dangerous road in the world…”