Copacabana & La Paz (Incl. the 'Death Road')

I needn't have been concerned about crossing the Peru - Bolivia border.  Went pretty much without a hitch (although we had to pay $5 each to replace a scrap of paper from our previous border crossing into Peru from Ecuador that we had both thrown away).

We headed to Copacabana, not quite it's Rio namesake in Brazil, but a very nice lake-side resort, on the Bolivia side of Lake Titicaca this time.  Being land-locked, it's probably the closest Bolivia gets to a 'beach'.  It being the weekend, plus the Christmas holidays, Copacabana was packed with South American families.  It's funny how similar it seemed to an English weekend away at the beach.  Fish suppers on the beach (well, trout by the lake-side), donkey rides (horses actually), fairground rides (just for the little ones), swimming in freezing waters just because you're on holiday and it has to be done (ditto).  Copacabana has lots of good cafes and is a nice place to hang out for a day.  Our hotel was a bit shitty - on discovering there was no loo-roll in our bathroom, Brad went to reception and was helpfully pointed in the direction of the nearest shop.

Now, a cha'lla in South America is any ritual blessing, toasting or offering to the powers that be - whether it be to the Christian god or Mother Earth, or whatever.  At fiestas and weekends, cars, trucks and buses park outside the cathedral in Copacabana decked in real/plastic flowers and banners for the 'Blessing of the Automobiles'.  The vehicles are blessed for the journey home.  The priest flicks holy water on the outside of the cars (the insides too) in return for donations of course.  Ritual offerings of alcohol (beer, or sparkling white if the owners are feeling flush) are poured over the cars and firecrackers set off in the street (a potentially dangerous combination you might think!).

It's not only cars that are blessed.  Models representing the real thing of anything you want blessed, be it vehicles, your business, piles of money, your home - can be purchased for a ceremony carried out by numerous 'qualified' witch doctors with incense and alcohol.  Some of the models are really cute - if I had the space I would have bought one of the kitchens - they came with perfect miniature packets of food, washing powder, all hand-made.  Better than a kid's toy.

We then headed on to La Paz, the de facto (governmental) capital of Bolivia (Sucre is the judicial capital - we'll be heading there later).  At 3,600m above sea level, this is one of the highest capital cities in the world.  It's a massive sprawling place, with buildings clinging to the sides of the canyon.  The snow-topped Illimani mountain (6402m) can be seen in the background on a clear day.  As we approached I was wondering how we would ever get our bearings in such a huge city, but it's amazing what you can do in a couple of days.  To be honest, I really didn't like La Paz.  It's one big market stall which smells of urine.  Seriously.  The smell is unbearable.  People pee everywhere!  Men and women just drop their kegs in the street whenever and wherever the urge takes them.

There's a section of market stalls called the 'Witches Market', where herbal and folk remedies are sold.  You can buy dried toucan beaks and even llama foetuses, buried as a cha'lla (the offering I mentioned above) to Mother Earth.  They can be buried under a new home to protect it.  I wondered how they get hold of so many - apparently 3000 llamas are slaughtered a day for meat, the foetuses come from those found to be pregnant.  You'd think they'd check first!

We had a look at (the outside) of San Pedro jail.  Having read about this in Rusty Young's book a couple of years ago, I was fascinated to see it.  This prison is unique.  There are no guards inside, inmates don't wear uniforms or have curfews.  Prisoners have to work to pay for their cells which range from relative luxury with cable tv, or 12-to-a-room slums.  80% of the inmates are there for cocaine smuggling.  The inmates children even live inside and family can come and go.  We watched the entrance for a while and took a few photos of the outside of the prison (it's on the edge of one of the main squares and looks pretty inconspicuous).  A guard made us delete the photos.  Tourists used to be able to go on 'guided tours' offered by the prisoners in exchange for some US dollars or some cigarettes or food, but not any more.

Just in case anyone's concerned that we 'missed out' on a traditional Christmas dinner here in Bolivia, I would like to reassure you that we still had it.  We had arranged to meet up two other couples that we had met along the way and knew would also be spending Christmas in La Paz.  One of the couples had just got engaged Christmas morning, which was quite sweet.  They told us that they had actually bought one of the llama foetuses (God knows why - they look far to delicate to have been transported home and what would Customs say?!), but apparently it smelled so bad they were forced to throw it away.  Apparently it only cost 30 bolivianos (about 2 pounds).  Despite it being Christmas, we didn't drink too much and had a relatively early night, having booked a tour for Boxing Day for which we needed all our wits about us.....

Something most tourists do when visiting La Paz is go on the WMDR (World's Most Dangerous Road), or the 'Death Road'.  This is a (mostly downhill) 64km stretch of road from just outside La Paz which has a vertical drop of 3600m along it's entire length, and sections of dirt track which are only 3.2m wide, with sheer drops of up to 600m.  Very few motorised vehicles use this road now that there's a paved bypass road since last year, but of course tourists pay good money to do the route on mountain bikes.

We went with a well-known company called 'Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking', who we'd highly recommend to anyone thinking of doing this.  Provided with $2,500 bikes, helmets, scarf, goggles, waterproof top/trousers and gloves, we were given individual instruction and safety advice.  It wasn´t all serious - we all took our turn to offer a cha'lla (that word again) to the gods - a sprinkling of alcohol over the tires and ground, plus a tiny little sip to protect us.  It was so cold at the top (the start of the ride) that we could see our breath.  I couldn't tell if I was a bit short of breath because of the altitude or because I was a bit nervous - probably a bit of both.  By the end you're in jungle territory and the air is hot and humid.  The route is so scenic (although of course while you're riding you're just concentrating on the ground just ahead of you, but there were numerous stops to take in the view).  The terrain changes from speedy asphalt at the start, to dusty gravel and rocky sections, through to rivers where your feet get wet.  There's even the occasional uphill section where, at high altitude, you feel like your lungs are going to burst (I haven't felt that bad since trying to keep up with Will running up those hills in San Fran).  Brad and I could taste blood, which was a bit scary.

I have to admit, I was not enjoying it at the start.  When the guide said 'now the Death Road starts!', I was honestly like, 'I thought we were already on it!'.  The Death Road is where the narrow, sheer-drop, gravel section is.  You develop a technique of travelling on the asphalt which all changes of course when you hit the gravel section.   To avoid getting a really sore arse, you have to spend a lot of time off the seat for a start, plus you have to avoid the bigger stones and rocks to avoid being thrown off course.  Plus most of the whole journey is downhill, you have to ride the breaks to some extent.  Not being an experienced bike rider, let alone mountain biker (remember I crashed into the inside of a short tunnel in Ecuador for God's sake!), I was pretty much 'Driving Miss Daisy' at the start.  Of course, the slower you go, the more you get thrown around.  Encouraged to travel in single file, with big gaps between each person in the group (there were 11 of us and three guides), we soon learnt our ranking within the group.  I would always be in the last 2 or 3, and Brad maintained third (pretty impressive considering that the first two were very keen stunt bikers).  I was enjoying myself towards the end (probably because I was just looking forward to that beer we had been promised), but Brad absolutely loved it from start to finish!  He'd do it again tomorrow.

Although traffic is South America travels on the right (and the sheer drops were on the left), we were encouraged to travel on the left of the road.  The rules are different on the 'Death Road' - traffic travels on the left so that the risk is taken by the driver with the best possible view of the outside tires.  Although very few vehicles still use this road, there is still some - we had to approach all bends as if oncoming traffic was approaching.

I would just like to say that I didn't fall over once.  There were only 3 girls in the group and one poor girl fell quite early on and spent the rest of the time in our bus that followed us.  Just when she felt better enough to rejoin the riding, the bus came across an avalanche that meant it had to turn back and take the alternate route to meet us at the other end.  We had to get off our bikes and walk with them to cross the very narrow path left from the rubble.

We ended the journey in an animal sanctuary, where animals are rescued from cruelty - some of them from the black markets in La Paz.  There was a tiny monkey wearing a nappy because it had the runs (apparently they use a nappy for premature human babies and just cut out a hole for it's tail).  Don't worry, we didn't touch it!  We were given our commemorative T-shirts that we had previously selected, that very welcome beer, a buffet lunch (cheeky monkeys and parrots kept trying to steal our food) and even provided with towels, toiletries and a hot shower before our 3 hour journey back to La Paz.  One of guides had taken plenty of photos and videos of the day and we purchased a CD for the memories - there's even a video of me stopping dead in the middle of the river because I hadn't selected the right gear to ride through it.  Ha ha.

Back in La Paz we were a bit market-ed out, so we headed to a cinema, hoping to find an English-speaking film with Spanish subtitles.  The only film we could find in English in four cinemas was 'Singing in the Rain' with Gene Kelly.  Yes, we were really that desperate.  Neither of us had seen it before.  What a pile of rubbish!  This was in a brand spanking new cinema which was very posh.  The only thing was, the architects had made a slight mistake- the backs of the seats were too high/the screen too low - you had to sit up really straight to see the whole picture.  Felt a bit sorry for the vertically-challenged Bolivianos (listen to me!) struggling to read the subtitles!

We booked an overnight bus for our onward journey, but were forced to spend (such a hardship I know) another night in La Paz (and buy more bus tickets) because we left half our clothes in a laundrette, which was closed when we went to collect them!  Doing long bus journeys during the night is preferable because it means you're saving on a night's accommodation and also not wasting a day when you could be doing stuff.  Despite this fact, we weren't really up for spending another day watching old movies, so heading off to spend the day on the bus as soon as we collected our laundry the next morning.