So having said our sad farewells to our Gap Adventures group (who were travelling on through Bolivia and into Chile - the trip we will do starting on 14th Dec) we were all on our own in the big, high altitude (3900metres above sea level)smog-fest that is La Paz!! We had 2 and a half long weeks stretching out ahead of us before we were due to leave and this really isn´t the sort of place you choose to spend a 2 week holiday!!
We checked in at Wild Rover, a party hostel and then did our sums and realised we´ve been spending way more than we were meant to, so partying was on hold and all of a sudden we had a budget to stick to!!! 150 bolivianos (15 pounds) per day, with the bed in the hostel costing 50 bolivianos a night, we were down to 100 each (10 pounds) per day! Sadly the cocktails we´d been drinking up to this point were costing 22 - 30 bolivianos each!!!! Ouch! A diet of 3 or 4 cocktails a day it is then!!!
So our first week was spent having early nights, getting up late and then touring the many coffee houses of this city trying to outstay our welcome for as long as we possibly could. N.B. We can now safely say that the only place you can get a decent cappuccino is Alexander Coffee, though it costs 20 bolivianos (only 2 pounds to you guys but one fifth of our daily budget!) And the week flew by!! We were getting up so late we were averaging having breakfast at about 3.30pm and then the traffic is so crazy here that it takes about an hour to cross the road, so no point trying to pack too much into a day! In terms of culture, we did manage to pop our heads into the San Francisco cathedral (admittedly for all of about 2 minutes) and the museum of contemporary art, and we´re still intending to visit the Coca museum. Then ater finding a gym on wed, we went to an aerobics class on thurs evening!!! No surprise to those who know me, that even in Bolivia I´m managing to get my gym fix in!! Now as we´re at high altitude the advice in the Lonely Planet is walk slowly, eat little and don´t have sex (one out of 3 of those has been particularly easy to stick to!!), so we find ourselves doing Body Attack one of THE most intensive cardio classes ever!! OMG, it was in a proper scary gym down in a basement, full of meatheads!!! This muscle machine guy bounces into the aerobics studio (a room with no air con and the slippiest floor ever!) and starts barking spanish at us!!!! Quite honestly kirst and I were terrified, he was jumping around and we were doing our best to keep up!! I´m not sure who i was more scared of, the guy instructing the class or the shit I´d get from kirst for suggesting we did the class in the first place!!! Anyway, somehow we got through it without requiring CPR or the use of an oxygen tank! And we were still speaking to each other afterwards!! We must have looked pretty hilarious, red-faced and sweating and looking like two girl guides who´d taken the wrong turning, in our hiking shoes and walking shorts (the best we had to wear!!)!!!
So after a week of early nights and no drinking we were getting serious alcohol withdrawal so we knew Friday was gonna be a big one!! We were really excited about it all day. After a couple of hours in an internet cafe in the afternoon we bought a big bottle of vodka and headed back to the hostel to get ready to party!!! Only to discover that with the presidential election on Sunday, drinking had been outlawed for THE ENTIRE WEEKEND!!!! To say we were gutted was an understatement, we laughed because the only alternative was tears!!! We´d known that nothing would be open from midnight sat so that sat night was a right off but not friday aswell!!!! We tried to make the best of it, got changed, put on a slick of mascara and sat in the hostel bar sipping our vodka and cokes. At first it was quite exciting, because the hostel was serving even though drinking was illegal so we were told the police could raid at any time and if they did we were to hide in an upstairs room, exciting!!!! and we had to keep the noise down so no one outside heard and raised the alarm. It was the 1920s prohibition all over again and here we were in a proper speakeasy!!! But without the sexy 1920s outfits, tights, red lipstick and the music it just wasn´t the same!! so 2 vodkas and a cheese toastie later and we took ourselves off to bed. Both secretly wishing we could teleport ourselves home for one final wild night out on the town in Brighton!
Sat we had a much better plan, we checked into a quiet hostel on the other side of town with a tv lounge and a huge collection of dvds and a kitchen so we could cook our own food and spend the whole weekend veging in front of the telly and eating! The one thing we´re missed (apart from decent music and cadburys chocolate) is sitting on the sofa watching movies! But then sat morning kirsty woke up with a bad case of d and v, yuk!! So the supermarket shop wasn´t quite as much fun with kirsty looking as white as a sheet and about to pass out and I still cooked veg fajitas but she never touched them, and then the tv lounge turned out to be home to the world´s most uncomfortable hard leather sofa ever!!
Sunday morning she was feeeling better and we strolled around town! It was sooo eerie!!! No restaurants, shops, taxis, the city was empty. It took us 10 mins to work to downtown la paz when on a normal day it takes 40 cos of the traffic and trying to cross the roads!!!! All the kids were out playing on their bikes (people actually have bikes here, on a normal day you´d be on a suicide mission if you rode a bike down these streets!) and were playing football in the middle of the dual carriageway, it was just like xmas day, apart from really hot and sunny!!! Basically we´re really glad we did stick around to see a totally different La Paz, it was quite an experience!! And that night it was round 2 for the fajitas, with kirst´s appetite returned and a dvd marathon!!!! Yay! Then early to bed cos we had a 3.30am start to catch a flight to the Amazon Basin for our jungle adventure. . . .
