We ended up on one of the dodgiest transfers to La Paz from Copacabana in Bolivia which involved crossing a lake in the pitch black, with a fishing-type boat full of people with the captain using a single torch to light his way! While we were carted onto this boat, the bus was left to get its own way across the lake, this method we failed to see in the dark but had thoughts that it would make a good excuse for the locals to raid it, stealing our backpacks! Once we got to La Paz (after Ruth almost got on the wrong bus after the crossing! Thank God I was with her!) we had a few panics as our bags failed to turn up in the first few compartments of the bus that the driver opened, yet luckily they were in the third one!

Arriving in La Paz around 10.30pm we were a bit worried to find our hostel looking closed with the shutters down! I didnt want the taxi to leave us in a dark deserted ally but after a few presses of the bell the small door opened and in we went. We met a guy from Ireland at breakfast who had been living in Manchester for the last 8 years too, who was also wanting to visit San Pedro prison that day so we asked if we could tag along with him. The prison, for those of you who dont know, is more like a small city than a prison. The prisoners do various jobs to make money inside the prison so that they can buy themselves better cells. Some of them have their wives and children living with them in the prison as well. There are no guards inside the prison, they just keep an eye on things from the outside, so there are often violent riots resulting in the death of some prisoners. It became famous from a book called Marching Powder (Ruth has read it, I havent) and is about an English guy, Thomas McFadden, who was caught trafficing drugs from Bolivia. He was banged up in San Pedro and a journalist who heard of the story ended up visiting him and living with him in the prison while he wrote the book. They have illegally organised tourist visits to the prision for the last couple of years but due to the recent riots they have been banned for the moment. Gutted, we really wanted to go and see what it was like!

The streets of La Paz are interesting - there are shoe shine boys who wear baseball caps and balaclavas and gloves so the only things you can see are their eyes! Probably an intimidation tactic as they seem to hound anyone with black footwear! The zebra crossings are interesting too - more like crossing zebras! There are actually people who stand on the side of the road dressed in zebra outfits waving the cars through and the people across! There is also a street known as Witches Market which sells all sorts of lotions and magic potions and llama foetuses... yuk!!

We asked in a tour company about the tour around San Pedro prison but he told us that the tours had been stopped for the forseeable future due to riots going on in the prison lately. We still had a wander to it to have a look but it did seem that no people were going in. A big shame as this was one of the main reasons for coming to La Paz. Instead we had a coffee, wandered around other streets of La Paz, booked in to see Cholita´s Wrestling (Bolivian woman wrestling!) that evening and went for a nice meal with the guy we had spent the day with (Gary) after the wrestling.

The wrestling was unlike anything we had ever seen before! They had ´special´seats for the gringos which were right at the front behind one barrier, and the locals had their own seats behind the gringos, which was behind another barrier. This was obviously because us gringos were the ones to get ´in on the action´so to speak! You´ll see why in a moment... The majority of it was men wrestling in silly costumes which was kinda fun to watch at first but it was obviously all a big show because they werent really hitting each other properly and it got a bit boring and same-old-same-old eventually. There was plenty of crowd participation which involved booing and cheering and throwing popcorn or water or fruit or nuts at the wrestlers. After a few too many male fights we finally got to see a match with two woman. Now these werent some American-type blonde muscular woman you may imagine, but actual Bolivian woman, dressed in traditional Bolivan dresses complete with long plats in their hair, hats, shawls, the works! This fight was even more brutal than the mens fights! Of course it was all still for show, but they were pulling each other´s hair, throwing each other into the crowd (into the gringos!), shaking up bottles of fizzy pop and soaking the crowd (again, mainly the gringos!), and soaking each other and allsorts! It was hillarious and thoroughly enjoyable to watch! Around 10 minutes before the end of the show, just before the last fight was about to finish, two guys who were part of the show, came into the arena wearing costumes that looked right out of a remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre! They were each carrying a HUGE peice of RAW meat with which they began not only hitting the other contestants with, but also started knocking down the barriers and chasing the gringos with! The smell from this meat was horrendous and there were a few poor people who actually did get hit with this disgusting piece of dead cow or sheep or whatever it was! The crowd was going wild and pretty much everyone was up out of their seats, running away from these men. There wasnt a lot of room to run so it could easily have ended up with some sort of stampede as people would be pushing and shoving their way through other people! At one point some Irish bloke who was a bit worse for wear got hit in the face with the meat, which he didnt take in the spirit of the whole show, and decided to pick up a section of the metal barrier and throw it at the man who had gotten him!! That didnt go down well with the people in the show and we honestly thought a massive fight was going to break out! Was a little bit scary because, if that did happen, there was no where really to get away from it. Luckily though it didnt turn into anything and we got out safely, having enjoyed the night and the experience.

We also booked a bike ride on a road known as The Death Road, due to its very narrow, gravelly path. Starting at 4600 meters above sea level at 8am the first hour was paved road and was a lot of fun as you were pretty safe just speeding down the road. Then came the dirt road which was a lot more difficult to ride on - one wrong move or a late brake could end up with you going over the edge of a 200 meter cliff.... death for sure. In fact, 8 years ago a woman did just that, proving that it is very dangerous indeed. Probably another reason it got its name. There were certainly a few hair raising moments when I lost control of the bike and Ruth actually fell off her bike a couple of times. Fortunately there were no fatalities and the only injuries were sore bums! We had a van following us so if we wanted a break we could jump in, however, when we came across a huge landslide blocking the way, the van had to return and meet us at the end. Climbing over the very muddy landslide (which our guide kept calling chocolate in an attempt to make it less life-threatening!) was scary - balancing yourself and a bike on the edge of a cliff with the mud sucking your feet in at the same time! We got through it with rather muddy shoes and very muddy bikes! After around 5-6 hours on the bike we arrived at the bottom and had a very well deserved cold beer before driving up to a hotel where we had free use of a gorgeous pool, hot showers and a not-so-nice dinner! An amazing day was had by all albeit very tiring so an early night with crisps and chocolate was in order!

One day we also visited the Coca Museum to find out the history of the coca plant and its leaves and how it is produced into the illegal substance we know today and what impact it had in the past. It was very interesting as it showed that there were actually many beneficial substances in the leaves before parts of it were subtracted for making cocaine, including vitamins and minerals beneficial to the human body. We learned that many years ago, slaves or hard grafting workers would be able to chew on coca leaves (which was of course legal and still is legal in Bolivia to this day) and it would give them enough energy to work for almost 48 hours without a break or food!! We learned that the USA is Bolivia´s biggest buyer of coca leaves because Coca-Cola (who used to have cocaine in their drinks) still use the leaves to flavour the drink today - albeit now without the cocaine! We were able to sample the leaves ourselves with a ´catalyst´which was supposed to give us some sort of high, but all it did was make our mouths numb!! The catalyst was ash of a banana tree or plant or something and with this catalyst, the leaves tasted a bit banana-like! Strange but kinda nice! The museum had a cafe on the second floor so we decided to try something with coca in it - we had 2 coca teas (which we had tried before) and a peice of coca & almond cake. The tea was okay but the cake was a bit dry and generally not very nice! It was also green, which didnt make it look any more appertising!

We also booked a 2 day 1 night trip to the Uyuni Salt Flats, which is a dried up lake whose remnants is a huge expanse of salt 12000km squared! The tour company arranged everything from the transport from La Paz to Uyuni, the trip on the salt flat, 1 night in a hotel made of salt and the train ride from Uyuni to Argentina - we wanted to go to Salta and Mendoza before heading to Chile. We got a bus from La Paz around 7pm which got us into Uyuni at 7am the next morning. The journey was terrible as we had a silly woman sitting behind us who kept pressing her knees or feet against my chair and kept Ruth and everyone else around her awake from the noise from her portable TV! We arrived into Uyuni very tired people. After breakfast we began our trip of the Salt Lake and met up with our fellow trip-ers! A lovely American couple from Seattle called Tony and Lacy, two young lads from Oxford, Ed and George, and another guy from northern Spain, Miguel. Our first stop was La Cementario de Trens (Train Cemetary) which was a load of old style rusted trains that had been dumped in the Salt Flats many years ago. They used to transport minerals from the flats to the surrounding towns. Next we drove along the flats so that in some directions you couldnt see anything on the horizon. You could just see the white of the salt then the blue of the sky.... amazing. We took the opportunity to make some daft photos of the group spelling out the word "SALT" and other pics that you could get due to the camera trickery of there being nothing in the horizon. We will get them onto Facebook as soon as we can. We then visited an island in the middle of the flats called Islande de los Pescados (Fish Island) for lunch. This was a huge bit of rock that once was underwater (remember its a dried up lake we were on) and so had dried up coral and cacti growing all over it - no idea why it was called Fish Island... it wasnt shaped like a fish or anything! Maybe it was called that as it used to be underwater, who knows! After lunch (which consisted of Llama meat, which no one knew until after!!! It was minging! Tasted like tough chicken that had been cooked the previous day and reheated 20 times) we headed to the hotel we were staying that night which was pretty much all made out of salt - salt walls, salt tables, salt stools, salt beds.... only thing that wasnt salt was the toilets and sinks! There was no running water which meant no showers, no hot water and you had to manually flush the toilet with a bucket. We watched the sun set that evening which was amazing because of the view we had - nothing on the horizon except a few mountains. Then we were in for a relatively cold night´s sleep, although we slept pretty well, probably due to the fact that we had almost no sleep on the bus the night before. We arranged to get up around 5.30am to watch the sunrise, which was also amazing. The colours of the sky and the reflection on the small expanse of water where we were standing were incredible. We took some excellent photos! After breakfast we went to visit the mummies which were on the side of the active volcano which overlooked the hotel we were staying at. It hadnt erupted for over 500 years but was still classed as´active´. The mummies consisted of a family (mother, father and baby) and two others. They were pretty well preserved and the mother mummy still had some hair! Was a bit gross but interesting at the same time. Then we were left to climb the volcano itself before lunch. This was a tough climb and Ruth didn´t get as far as I did. The first part was pretty steep and rocky... passing some wild llamas on the way. The other males in the group seemed to gallop up it and before long we couldnt see them ahead! Ruth and Lacy started lagging behind while I went up on my own. The second part of the climb wasnt as steep which was good, although most of the energy was sapped in the first part! Due to that, I didnt get much further but I had an amazing view of the volcano´s crater. I got Ed, on his way down, to take a photo of me with the crater in the background, to show people how far up I got. Ed, George and I were decending and bumped into Ruth and Lacy a bit further down and after a short break carried on with the decent. Lacy stopped and waited for Tony, who had carried on even further than anyone else and Ed and George zoomed down themselves so Ruth and I were on our way back down when we saw our guide driving up to come and get those still on the volcano! We obviously were taking too long! So after getting picked up and picking the others up a little way further up, we were back in the salt hotel having lunch. After lunch we got back in the jeep and headed back to Uyuni, stopping for a few more minutes to take more crazy photos on the salt flats. Back in Uyuni we had 6 hours to kill until our train to Villazon (Argentinian border) so we went to a pub with Tony and Lacy, whose bus was a few hours before our train. We didn´t have the time or energy to perform the ´super shot challange´at this Extreme Fun Pub! For 200 Bolivianos (around 20 pounds) your challange was to down around 20 shots as fast as you could, the record being 38 seconds! Some of the shots were disgusting - beer mixed with tequila and vodka and allsorts. While we were there some American guy did it in around 50 seconds. I think I would have tried it and so would have Lacy if we were staying in Uyuni for the night. But the thought of that before an overnight train journey just wasnt appealing. So we said our goodbyes, Ruth and I had a meal and then got our train at 10.30pm to Villazon.

The train ride wasnt very good either - a guy snoring away behind us didnt help us fall asleep, neither did the crazy noises of scraping metal that the train was making! Luckily the guy behind got off the train a few hours into the journey so I moved behind Ruth and we got a little bit of sleep. We woke up around 7am and one of the men who worked on the train invited me, Ruth and an Irish girl, Ciara, sitting near us into the cabin behind. We were a bit confused as to what this was for because none of us could understand what he said. Anyway we ventured into what we discovered was the food cabin and sat down to a free breakfast of bread, crackers, jam, tea or coffee and scrambled eggs! Only us three had been invited for some reason! Was rather funny to be the only ones in the cabin being waited on or even to have been invited! It was appreciated though as we got to know Ciara and as we finished we pulled up into Villazon station. After a 1km walk with our heavy bags and taking one wrong turn, we ended up at the Argentina border. It took around an hour and a half in total to get exit stamps from Bolivia and entry stamps into Argentina! We had decided that before going to Mendoza we would stop at Salta for a couple of nights, which had been recommended by people we had met. So at the border we got a taxi to the bus station in La Quiaca, the first town after the border in Argentina. We were happy to be in Argentina again as we loved it the first time! That will continue in another blog....