Someone once told me “either you have a good trip or a good story.” Well, we had a good trip (all of our flights were on time, we made all of our connections from Toulouse to Paris to Buenos Ares to Santa Cruz to La Paz) but what fun is there in hearing about a good trip? Better to have a good story!
Let’s start with our shoes. We all wore our hiking/snow shoes for the trip. 4000 meters, below 0° c at night in La Paz when we would arrive, I mean, we wore them on the plane, JUST TO BE READY. Let’s just say that 36 hours is a loooong time to be wearing those shoes. When the pilot announced just before we touched down in Santa Cruz that the local temperature was 31°c (80°f), we all looked at each other in horror. So there we were standing in line to get through Immigrations, being controlled by people wearing short sleeves, and we were dying in our snow boots.
Turns out that we were switching planes and instead of going through a transit lounge, we actually had to go out of the airport and try to find our way back in. The next plane was packed to La Paz, full of people of European and Indian origins. The descent into La Paz, if you can call it a descent as the plane basically climbed the whole flight , was incredible. The airport is situated about 1000m above certain areas of the city (La Paz ranges that distance from top to bottom) so we started to land in total darkness seemingly in the clouds. The city glimmered below like a gold and diamond draped cloth on a bed of velvet. As we were so far up, we could not distinguish streets or houses or roads like one usually can when one lands. It was a very smooth landing so the images that had been haunting me since we left Argentina of the South American football team whose plane crashed in the Andes and they turned to cannibalism to survive … just “poof”, disappeared. They were replaced with images of a guppy gasping for air…wearing snow shoes. Ah, yes, Altitude sickness, would we crumple to a heap upon arrival? No actually, we all felt rather woozy but we were not sure if it was due to the altitude or the lack of sleep. We made it through customs and Philippe and his future bride, Alejandra, were waiting for us on the other side … wearing flip-flops.
