Hi from La Paz!
Wow, what a city!
We´ll write more about La Paz shortly, but in the interest of proper chronology this post will be about how we got here.
They say the Altiplano is flat. ¨Plano, solamente plano,” we heard from many helpful Bolivians. And I suppose from an automobile it seems that way. Shucks, the first 25 km from Oruro were like a 30-km-wide 12,000´high pancake, albiet a pancake sprinkled with all types of garbage. The farther we got from the center, the less concentrated was the garbage. Like a landfill dropped from the stratosphere. Then beyond rim of our pancake the road trended slightly but undoubtedly upwards.
We took a short side-trip to a hotspring resort that proved to be well worth the effort. A huge steaming swimming pool was surrounded by private rooms with smaller tubs about 4´deep. It was HOTTTTTT! It would´ve been better to arrive there after a week of difficult touring instead of three days relaxing in Oruro, but hey, hotsprings rock! Our muscles went to jelly.
We opted not to get a room in their hostal in favor of camping in the open desert. We found a great spot but there was an elderly woman sheperding her flock of sheep nearby. We figured we oughta ask her if it was OK, so Elicia went over very politely to have a little chat. She got yelled at in Queqhua (the language of the Inca empire, still in common use here) or possibly Ayamara (a far older language that survived the Inca takeover, of which the Ayamaras are rightfully proud.) We have no idea what she said, but it wasn´t friendly at all. So we went elsewhere and camped next to a dry arroyo.
At around midnight after a few hours of rain we woke up to the sound of deep rushing water. Remember everybody, Never Camp In Arroyos!
The next few days were rather uneventful, and completely lacked any kind of steep hills. But we gained 1,500´of elevation in several long descents followed by slightly longer ascents. The nights got colder. The air got thinner. The traffic increased as we approached the metropolis.
All of a sudden there was a huge white pyramid jutting into the sky on the horizon. It had to be Huyana Potosi, the most photographed mountain in Bolivia. Probably the most-often climbed one too. How can a 6,000 meter peak remain hidden from view until it´s only a day´s ride away? Ain´t this altiplano supposed to be flat?
Soon there were more gleaming white teeth biting way up into the sky. Nevado Illimani, all 6,500 meters of it, somehow snuck up on our right side just across a big big valley. We didn´t grasp how big a valley until we found ourselves riding through the suburban nightmare of El Alto, which occupies the plain above the gorge in which La Paz lives. It took twenty flat straight kilometers of sooty exhaust & heavy traffic for us to reach the descent into La Paz. Then all of a sudden we were on the edge of an enormous cliff-lined gorge that dropped away as far as the eye could see. Every square meter of land that wasn´t absolutely dead-vertical (and some that were) had buildings on it. In the middle , 2,000´below, were skyscrapers. Welcome to La Paz!
There´s more oxygen down there too.
-Andy