Bye Peru, hello La Paz, Bolivia

Our two-week Peruvian adventure ended this morning when we flew out of Cusco to La Paz, Bolivia. It’s only an hour-long flight. We’re now back to a slightly higher altitude, and we’ve also moved an hour ahead.

Our guide, Franz, was waiting for us at the airport and led us to the car and driver to go to our hotel. La Paz is in a valley and has a population of about 750,000. El Alto, the higher ground above La Paz, has a population of about 1.2 million.

Franz won’t be taking us around La Paz until tomorrow so he suggested we take a wander around our immediate neighbourhood including a market full of handicrafts and souvenir stuff as well as the “witches market” which he said he would explain to us tomorrow. We told him we wanted to go somewhere informal for dinner, not where tourists go. He suggested we go sample Bolivian fast food fried chicken at a place called Copacabana. So that’s what we did.

The market isn’t a building but an area of a number of streets. Franz warned us that there were lots of hills in La Paz and he wasn’t kidding. Much like in Peru, alpaca wool and lamb’s wool items dominate the shops. The witches market was stocked with dehydrated animals😳, talismans and herbs. Looking forward to hearing more about this tomorrow. We did go to Copacabana for dinner and the fried chicken was fabulous. No cutlery is available but there are sinks at the front of the store to wash your hands.

Our first impressions of La Paz is it’s a colourful, bustling city with street venders everywhere, traffic chaos and plenty of murals. We’ll have a better sense of it tomorrow after we tour around.

We’re spending the night in and resting up for tomorrow.Read more