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La Paz is a city of extremes. At the height of the black market you find yourself swarmed within a seething mass of cholita's (the Bolivian bowler hat wearing, huge skirted women), cheap clothing, thick smelling meat and stolen cameras up for resale. 20 minutes walk downhill and you are eating blueberry pancakes listening to jazz while a skinny mustached butler brings you a cappuccino. The indigenous culture here is strong and proud and prevalent, but modernity nestles comfortably in La Paz as well. It's a great city, and we found ourselves unable to leave as the weeks ticked by.
La Paz is a city within a country that takes hats very seriously. Not mundane hats, only the fabulously suave and debonair bowler, trillby or fedora, made hyper-fabulous when precariously perched atop a mountainous cholita in all her twirling skirted glory. Walking down a bustling market street here you are likely to find such cholitas with their prized stovepipe bowler wrapped meticulously in a plastic bag atop their heads. The hats, a hugely expensive outlay for some people here but a total necessity, are taken very seriously. And as I like to take hats seriously also, La Paz seemed a great place for me.
I decided, perhaps naively, to order a bunch of hats - handmade to perfection in exact colours and measurements, in a wide range of fancy yet sophisticated designs. With the help of google translate I readied a small script which I haltingly announced to seemingly thousands of impatient and unhelpful hat sellers. Finally I found a tiny cobbled alley lined with floppy, shapeless hat beginnings drying in the sun. There I met Don Louis, a towering ogre of a man with quiffed black hair and a large strip of cow hide hanging over his mountainous belly. I read my script, set my order and skipped away to eagerly await hat crowned glory. On my return five days later I found a groggy Don Louis, unshaven and black eyed from a supposed fantastic brawl from the weekend before. And no hats.
La Paz has some interestingly left of centre tourism ventures. The mythic hype surrounding the San Pedro Prison is reasonably global thanks to the book Marching Powder, one most travelers visiting Bolivia seem to have read - except us. San Pedro is a prison run by the prisoners - a city within the city with small prison suburbs featuring prisoner elected, prisoner mayors. The prisoners also control the punishment regime - which leads to many gruesome stories surrounding a small pool in the 'town square'.
Upon booking this ridiculously bizarre prison visit we were picked up by an ex-inmate. The South African export took us through the rules while we all stood captivated by the coke crust that framed his nostrils. He reminded us skittishly that buying coke inside the prison was risky, so buying it direct from him was the best plan. He was the best anti-drug advertisement I've ever seen. Once inside the prison a Latino American Gangsta Hollywood cliché (but real) took us on a guided tour of a place he referred to smugly as 'summer camp'. The experience was seriously odd and mostly horrible. This horror was confounded by the smirky twatish English boys we met outside, who proceeded to ask whiny questions and crack painful jokes. I wanted to punch their ignorant touristy faces, before realizing that I had been the one who paid a whole lot of hush money to go in and stare at murderers.
La Paz, like Sucre, is constantly parading and marching about in the early hours - equipped with loud exploding booms, fireworks and loudly tooting instruments. These marches and explosions often mark a daily protest, and we were lucky enough to become caught up in one of the more violent persuasion. We have often wondered what the purpose of the riot squad police that line the street daily could be - only to find when eating breakfast one morning protesters swarming the streets with a wooden Evo Morales that they preceded to burn and curse. The riot squad came out in force, and we were stuck for 6 hours surrounded by sharp gun shots and angrily chanting Bolivians. The riot meant we missed our bus out of the city, and this became one of many times when we found it impossible to leave La Paz.
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