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Tilly's Latino Travels
Hey all,
I'm now in Bolivia in La Paz! We came in to Bolivia and stayed at a hotel which was right on lake titicaca in a place called Copacabana. It had the most amazing views of the water and was even better when the sun was setting. We spent two days there and had a trip out on the lake visiting a couple of the islands with more inca ruins on called Isla de la Luna and Isla del Sol. We ate lunch on one of them and it was so peaceful and quiet it was amazing. One of the most beautiful and untouched places I think I have ever visited.
Back in Copacabana shopping has officially started as everything is amazingly cheap here. We went out for a 5 course meal and it cost less than 1.20 pounds each! I then got a round of three cocktails and a coke at it came to a grand total of about 3 pounds. Great place!
From there we drove on to La Paz which is officially the highest capital city in the world. We have been on a great city tour today where we saw the highest golf course in the world, the highest olympic swimming pool, the highest burger king...... and more but I won't bore you all, I think you get the picture that we are pretty high up here!
La Paz is an amazing city, with markets galore (yes a small amount of shopping has been done - well maybe a little more than that but made sure that I bought an extra bag to get it all home in!). It has the most amazing witches market where there are plenty of dried flowers, mysterious powders, 'magic cream`from giant snails, and even things like llama feotuses.
Bolivia has been declared the most corrupt country in South America for the past 5 years apparently, and I am beggining to see more and more examples of this. Last night some friends were in a taxi when it crashed (not badly or anything, but enough to attract the attention of a police officer) the solution to this was when the tax driver came quickly to the car to get out some money to go nd bribe the police officer with. Our tour guide today enlightened me further with this corruption as he showed us the local prison - not too high security though as you often see people running down the street with handcuffs on and the police following! The prison is also the place to go to and hang around outside if you want to buy drugs here! But what probably amused us the most is that the wealthy people in the prison are actually allowed out at the weekends (to get away from the hard prison life that they have with sky tv and internet etc) and allowed to go clubbing! The poor people however are too poor to even get a lawyer to represent them and end up in prison for loads longer than they should have otherwise been.
Anyway, so far so safe here, although we have another new experience... voting day. There is a referendum on sunday and so people officially are not allowed to buy alcohol after 9pm tonight to make sure locals aren't drunk when they vote. (Everyone has to vote and there are fines for those who don't) Then on Sunday no-one is allowed to travel anywhere unless they have permission incase they travel to another voting centre and vote twice! We were planning to leave La Paz on Sunday, but even we can't get excluded and so there has to be a slight change of plan now and looks like we are stuck here. Nothing will be open as no-one can travel to work and so the hotel are laying on a BBQ for us and looks like I will be forced to catch up on a bit of Wimbledon.
Nothing like something to make travelling a bit more uncertain and fun hey! We should all be fine, - we'll be keeping a low profile, but shouldn't be in any danger atall - don't worry mum!
That's about it for now, about to go out for dinner for someone's birthday.
Thanks for email updates - enjoying catching up on uk life.
Love Tilly x x
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