Hola todos, playing catch up still. Over the next few days we spent in La Paz I did a couple of things together with my new pal, we did go up to El Alto again but I’ll skip over that since I covered that pretty well on the first post for this leg.
Our second big cable car excursion took us on the green line to La Paz to a quite nice neighborhood called Calocoto which was the last stop on linea verde. From there we haggled and sorted out a taxi to go to a valley, specifically El Valle de las Animas. This is quite a spectacular piece of natural geography looking like something out of a fictional planet in any sci fi themed movie or videogame.
It is about half hour out of town from the cable car stop, we took a taxi ride up here for the equivalent of £6.50 which is very decent. Once you get there the area around it isn’t too nice with more makeshift housing and the fact you have an open sewer pipe spewing out water right by where you pay the £1 entrance fee! They really should do something about that. By the by.
We pay and in we go. This is a great place however we didn’t hike all of it, in fact we probably bearly done a third of it. It is all uphill and in altitudes north of 4000 meters you are knackered and struggling to breathe very quickly.
We probably got to about 1/4 of the trail before we decided to turn back after getting some cool photos. Apparently if you hiked the entire thing it would take more than 8 hours! Still it was a picturesque sight for what little of it we seen.
On the walk back down we passed a bunch of guys doing this on an ATV tour – they had the right idea not like us pair of clowns force marching ourselves uphill. Oh well at least we saw it without spending bags of cash! Coming back was fun as we jumped in a random collectivo and managed to get ourselves back to the station without too much issue other than cramped legs from how small those minibuses were – they are not built for Europeans clearly!!
On the way back I got chatting to (not) Ed some more and he recommended another place much easier called the Valle de la Luna, I would make plans to do this over the weekend.
Speaking of the weekend things were about to get very boring around here. It was now Thursday evening and I go out with (not) Ed and his Peruvian BF and have some grub and a few beers. We are aware that this Sunday is the national mayor and provincial governor elections in Bolivia. What does this mean for us? Well the Bolivians take their elections very seriously and in order to get people to go out and vote the entire weekend of the election is a dry event 😳! Yes that’s right from 12am Friday to midday Monday sales of alcohol are banned in shops and officially in bars and restaurants (though we later managed to find 2 places that would serve us over Friday and Saturday). Moreso on the day itself and everything is grounded for election day, no shops bars restaurants open, no public transport, any cars have to have a special permit to be on the road and even international flights are grounded on this day. Sunday was a complete shutdown.
As we were sitting in this bar they suddenly bring us the bill at midnight on the dot saying it’s now in effect we have to pay up and get out as they are closing. Fun stuff. However our pal (not) Ed has lived in Peru a long time and says they do the same there but no worries there is always someone out to make a buck who will sort you out for a beer so not to worry. After this we say our goodbyes and agree to reconvene tomorrow evening to work out the situation.
On the next installment I will cover election weekend and Valle de la Luna. Ciao for now!
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