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Straight from our four day Machu Pichuu hike, feeling somewhat smelly and minging, we were on an overnight bus to La Paz, Bolivia. Much to our joy of course as there is also the lovely boarder for us to go over. Thankfully, we reached it by morning allowing at least a few hours of sleep time.
The bus would drop us off one side of the boarder wait for us to go through and get our exit stamp from customs, walk to Bolivia (sounds really far!) to their customs for an entry stamp and jump back on the bus. This sounding like a quick job right?..wrong!! Took us nearly two hours! There were crowds of people queuing and with bus passengers at no exception. On top of being extremely smelly, tired, hungry and slightly dazed from lack of rest we had to watch person after person insisting on pushing in front of us in the long long line to get to the customs officer. There really is no etiquette here, ever, when it comes to supposedly 'waiting your turn', they will push in front and shove you out the way without a quibble.
When eventually arriving to La Paz in our delirious travel-induced haze, we didn't really know what to think. Our minds were darting everywhere as were our eyes, from the colours and busy streets through to the smell of gas and dusty air. It was one of those 'Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" moments, surreal, intimidating and slightly nauseating so, not overly breath-taking to say the least. Luckily our hostel was a short walking distance from the bus terminal so we darted there out of the bustle to instantly face-plant the bed.
As much as we would have loved to sleep the whole day through, we must stay awake to avoid bodging up our body clocks; this is going to be hard. Both with a very short patience and in very hot and muggy heat, if we have both avoided killing one another by bed time it will be a great achievement.
La Paz is just a stopover for us as we are now on a really tight and fast moving schedule, just one night here and then another overnight bus to Uyuni, about sixteen hours south. So, we must use our time and energy wisely.
La Paz was like a city unlike any other we had visited. There's so much happening all at once, I could never really figure out whether it was endearing or just, well, a bit of a hectic dump.
First of all, we noticed the lack of oxygen in the air, walk a few metres up hill and we would already start to huff and puff- La Paz is over 3,500m above sea level! And although the city itself didn't appear too attractive the surrounded snow capped mountainous views were jaw dropping.
We didnt manage to do either of the things we had planned for La Paz, one being to ride the Death Road and the other to travel over the city on the highest cable car in the world-Mi Teleferico, these are two of the most popular attractions, so I am pretty sad to have missed out on them.
So instead choose to pace the city at our own leisure and try to regain strength for the next leg of our journey. The city centre lined with small shops, tour agencies, witch markets, stray dogs, overwhelming stench of cooking chicken, all this with many attached winding side streets to get a bit more lost down, hours can disappear before your eyes.
With a population of 840,000+, the city is certainly of a size and we have seen barely any of it, two days here would have been perfect to have a good gallivant around.
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