La Paz

Eight days ago at this time of night we were in the process of stuffing our gear into the backpack once again: we were getting ready to leave La Paz and board the bus for Lima in the morning. 

Was it only the fact that we had been here before that made me sad to leave this city where I had left Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Asunción behind with a light heart? Was it the knowledge that we were nearing the end of our trip? 

No, I don’t think it had much to do with that. During our travels there have always been some places that have touched my heart, made me feel, in some strange way, that I belonged. I am filled with a deep sadness when I leave them, and I leave a piece of myself behind. Cusco is one of those places, and Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, the rocky hills of the hacienda of a distant relative in Argentina, Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca … What makes these more special than so many other beautiful locations I cannot say. I do know for certain that I love the highlands in all the South American countries where we have travelled, be it Ecuador or Colombia, Peru or Bolivia. It has to do with the clear air, the landscape, the steep slopes, the breathtaking views, being nearer to the sky, maybe, but there also is something about  the people of these high altitudes that touches me and draws me in. 

                              

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We arrived in La Paz around three-thirty in the afternoon after a short one-hour flight from Santa Cruz. The La Paz airport is the highest point of the city at 4,200m altitude, and we were a little worried how this would affect us after spending all this time in the lowlands. Walking slowly, sucking on ‘lifesavers’ (sweets being recommended to counteract the effects of high altitude), we found that we didn’t have a problem. 

According to our travel guide there were plenty of ‘micros’ – small busses – running between airport and city centre, a much cheaper option than a taxi. Dodging taxi drivers in search of passengers – it helps to know you are not taking a taxi! – we went looking for a micro. Our destination, we had decided, would be the Plaza San Francisco. From there we wouldn’t have far to walk to the hostel, if we remembered correctly from last year. Micros were parked along the curb, and we soon found one that would be travelling in the right direction. Our backpack was hoisted onto the roof (Johann’s help was much appreciated since the driver was much shorter), and we were ushered into the back of the twelve-passenger van, or rather minivan. By the time we got going every single cramped seat was occupied: returning or visiting travellers, mostly businessmen, it seemed, but also two soldiers in the blue dress uniform of the navy. Interestingly, Bolivia, although it lost access to the ocean to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) and now is completely land locked, maintains a small naval force, mostly stationed on Lake Titicaca. The sky was clear enough to give us a good view of snow-crowned Illimani, Bolivia’s second highest mountain and the most important landmark of La Paz, venerated by its people.The centre of La Paz is more than 500m lower than the airport, and the drive down affords great views of this city that fills the whole narrow valley and sends spurs up the steep hillsides enclosing it protectively. 

The micro driver descended at a good clip, the bumpy road causing us to turn around anxiously off and on, checking to make sure our bag hadn’t ended up on the road by any chance. Once we entered the city proper our ‘taxi’ stopped from time to time to disperse one or the other of the passengers, and finally we, too, were let off at the Plaza San Francisco in front of the church of the same name, right in the heart of La Paz. Shouldering our packs we crossed the plaza and found ourselves at the bottom of steep ‘Calle Sagarnaga’. Step by slow step we climbed up, passing street vendours, cubicle offices of travel agents and restaurants, stopping to catch our breath after a particularly steep section. After a couple of blocks we arrived at the intersection to busy Calle Illampu: we were almost there. It was as if we had just walked along this street yesterday, not a whole long year ago. The traffic, too, had not changed since, and we crossed doing the only thing one can do in La Paz: wait until traffic comes to a standstill (which is every few steps, it seems) and wind your way through the three or four lanes of cars, making eye contact with the drivers of the vehicles in front of which you pass. Actually, by now that feels like a safer way to cross than on wide, less crowded streets, aided by traffic lights without any ‘communication’ with the driver.

We had decided on the same hostel we stayed last year during our time in La Paz, the 'Sol Andino' in Calle Aroma, just off Illampu, and the same woman greeted us when we entered - it's a strange feeling to return to a familiar place when one travels like we do. While the hostel lacks atmosphere a little and, more importantly, the common room that is the heart and meeting place of so many hostels, the rooms are spacious and very clean, the breakfast is good, and the location is as close to perfect as it could possibly be, within walking distance to pretty much all the important places in the city centre.

Johann was feeling a bit under the weather, but I was hungry and went in search of something to eat after a good nap. By now it was eight pm and dark, but Illampu was teeming with people, as far as I could see very few of them tourists. Here it was, the atmosphere I had so longed for without realizing it: the woman sitting beside a pile of mangoes, engaged in conversation with her neighbour selling empanadas and cuñapés (small cheese ‘buns’), tables piled with wrist watches, tools, Christmas decorations, children’s toys, bananas, glasses; women knitting (many of them!), one with a spool of white yarn twirling between her feet, planted far enough apart to make room, unceremoniously lifting up her woolen sweater to silence the whining of a cranky toddler by plunking a nipple in his mouth …  I slowly walked the two blocks to the intersection with Sagarnaga, savouring every step, the din of traffic and voices, breathing deeply the tantalizing scents. There, at the corner, were the stands I remembered so well: piled with all kinds of goods, bundles of chamomile, mint and many other hierbas, herbs, emitted their wonderful fragrances.

I turned around and walked back, stepping a couple of steps down from the sidewalk into a tiny tienda to buy a bottle of water and a couple of bananas from a woman obviously flustered by this foreign visitor. I stopped once more at a small restaurant for some cheese empanadas, heated in the microwave, courtesy of the vendor, so that they’d be nice and hot when I arrived home.   
  

Several times more we strolled along Illampu and down Sagarnaga in the next few days, on the last day branching off into little side streets filled with shops catering mostly to tourists, selling everything from the soft hand-knit sweaters made with alpaca or, even softer, baby alpaca wool, hats and ponchos to jewellery, bags, hammocks and an amazing array of  musical instruments. I could have spent hours looking at the hand crafted guitars, adorned with wood inlay and other lovingly carved details, and the smaller charangos, small Andean string instruments belonging to the lute family with ten strings in five groups of two each, traditionally made with the back of the shell of armadillos but now more often crafted with wood, which not only is easier to find but also offers a better resonance. There were also many different kinds of flutes, from pan flutes to quenas, the original six-hole flute of the Andes, and, of course, percussion instruments. I would have loved to bring home a charango, but apart from the difficulty of transporting it, what would I do with it later, unable to play and without the opportunity to learn? Instead, I settled for a CD with musica tipica.

I imagine it would be easy to assume that this part of the city is serving mainly tourists (even though not a whole lot of them were around when we were there; maybe it was the wrong part of the year), but apart from all the aforementioned shops selling handicrafts there are many street vendours very obviously not catering to tourists, not only in Illampu but also in Sagarnaga.

The so-called ‘Witches’ Market’, for example, is without doubt very interesting to look at, but most of the things sold here, between Sagarnaga and Calle Santa Cruz, along calles Linares and Jimenez, would not find their way into the home of the average tourist. Herbs and seeds, folk remedies and aphrodisiacs, soapstone and clay figurines are one thing – but who would be interested in a llama fetus or dried frogs??

When I discovered the first of these lama fetuses – sometimes covered in short fur, sometimes with only the leathery skin stretched over the bones – it didn’t really register what I was looking at, and my glance swept over it without recognition. Once I did see it for what it was, however, there was no avoiding them: hung side by side above the vendours’ heads, stacked tightly in shelves they are as much a part of the whole scene as the piles of cut flowers and stacks of vegetables in stands a little higher up the street. According to what I could find out on the internet the llama fetuses are always buried in the foundations of new constructions or businesses, offerings to Pachamama, the Earth Mother, revered by Andean people since Inca times, to protect the workers and bring good fortune to the business.

 

We ventured beyond our immediate and so very intriguing surroundings as well, of course. One walk led us up the hill opposite Sagarnaga to the ‘Plaza Murillo’, La Paz’s central plaza, surrounded by important buildings like the Presidential Palace, the cathedral and the National Congress of Bolivia. Content to observe them from a bench in the plaza instead of entering we noted a strange feature: for whatever reason the numerals on the clock of the congress building are arranged counter-clockwise, so it appears to run ‘backward’.   

A little higher up the hill, in Calle Jaen, I had the opportunity to find out more about the music of the Andes when we visited the Museum of Musical Instruments, 'Museo Instrumentos Musicales de Bolivia'. This is an wonderful, privately run museum, housed in a colonial building, where a huge array of musical instruments has been assembled. Different rooms contain everything from pre-Colombian instruments made of stone, clay, wood, bone and even flutes crafted from condor feathers to modern instruments sorted according to type. One room is dedicated to miniature depictions of musical instruments and Bolivian dance scenes. Here, the ‘smallest guitar in the world’, no bigger than the head of a pin, can be viewed through a magnifying glass. Other rooms contain musical instruments from different time periods gathered from all corners of the world, sheet music, and strange inventions like guitars with two necks mounted back to back, or with five necks arranged around a pentagonal body like the spokes of a wheel. Many of them were created by Ernesto Cavour, an accomplished Bolivian musician who founded the museum in 1962. 

Guards keeping watch over the sarcophagus of Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz, the third Bolivian president, between the cathedral and the presidential palace

 

We went on one more very interesting excursion before we left La Paz on Saturday morning: a guided tour to the pre-Colombian archaeological site Tiwanaku (Spanish Tihuanaco or Tihuanacu), but I will save that for another posting.