Out of breath in La Paz

After the European feel of Sucre we were not hugely looking forward to La Paz. Noone really raves about it that much, we'd certainly had no real recommendations. We had also heard of plenty of people struggling with the altitude and getting sick from bad food.

We decided to fly from Sucre in the end as it only took 45 minutes that way and the bus was apparently a bone-rattling 11 hours. At a touch over 40 quid it was a no-brainer!

You fly into La Paz over some fantastic mountain scenery, another bonus of going by air. We arrived at La Paz's airport at around 4100m above sea level and immediately felt it! We had heard a hostel called Adventure Brew was good and dished out a free beer every night. Sadly the room was absolutely freezing and Tash again succumbed to altitude sickness. We did manage to go see the pre-Inca ruins at Tiwanaku one day and book flights to Rurrenabaque in the Bolivian Amazon too. Tiwanaku was a hugely important site for the tribe of the same name who were around for almost 2000 years before the Inca's. When Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was elected he was inaugurated at Tiwanaku. Amongst the sites was a huge Sun Gate, a stone weighing 13 tonnes that had made it to the site and over 100 carved heads to represent important people, gods and aliens! The Bolivian's believed the heads were aliens as that is how they explain how the huge stones were moved there.

After the jungle we returned to La Paz for a few days and were looking forward to meeting up with Helen and Ruth and Helen's boyfriend Phil was also flying out. This time we stayed in our first 'party hostel', Loki. It was actually a lot nicer than Adventure Brew and not half as cold! We met Helen and Ruth and had a terrible curry the first night. The second day had seen Phil arrive overnight and we also decided to go see the locally famous Cholita Wrestling. Basically amateur wrestling featuring the local ladies! This was really good fun. The costumes were great, the action fun and the locals were mad for it! The next day was souvenir shopping followed by a night out. We'd barely felt well enough before and it was Phil's birthday so we were looking forward to it. We decided to enter the quiz in the hostel bar (we won!) and sink a few 'blood bombs' (the house speciality!). We then ventured out to the Hard Rock Cafe. Tash and Ruth outlasted the rest of us dancing until the early hours!

The last day was mostly spent hungover before we headed to Copacabana and then on into Peru...