La Paz & Tihuanaco - Gate way to the Sun

Che Guevarra is BIG in Bolivia and other places in South America. He is on everything. We met a guy from Argentina who was horrified at the capitalistic exploitation of Che - which is exactly everything he opposed!

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The city of La Paz is a pretty amazing place.  It sits at about 13000 feet and as Osa says, "The combination of thin air and car exhaust brings a new meaning to the word breathing hard."  The strange thing is, when you hear about a city sitting that high it is easy to imagine it growing up the side of a mountain.  That isn´t actually the case.  It sits in a valley or bowl that is really quite deep.  From the road that enters from the Peru side, after going through some really rough outskirts, you get a view as you come up to the edge of the drop of the city.   There are only 1.2 million people in it but from above it looks huge!  It also kind of looks like someone with a giant cup of city poured it into the hole and it stuck to the sides.  (I know that might not make sense... but I don´t know how else to describe it.)

Another day in the life of La Paz

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There was a really great energy level in the city and even late at night lots of people were out wandering around.  A kind of odd aspect of the place was that the number of rotisserie chicken places was ridiculous.  They absolutely dominated any other kind of restaurant and in some areas we saw as many as 4 in a row side-by-side.  They all managed to stay in business somehow!

An hour and a half outside of La Paz sits Tihuanaco. (or Tiwanaku) It is a pre- Inca civilization dating to 600BC. Much of their knowledge and science were later adapted by the Inca. Very little of the site has been excavated as you will see from the pictures.