The Upside-Down City

La Paz, Bolivia, as viewed from the autopista on the way into the city

La Paz is an odd-beast of a place: sitting in a canyon high on the Altiplano, nearly 4000m above sea level, the highest capital city in the world doesn´t quite conform to your standard city layout. In most cities, especially in Europe and the States, you find that things generally get better as you go up - the weathly and upper class head for the hills (if there are any), and sit up there with a nice view of all below them. But not here.

When La Paz was founded by the Spanish, some 400 or more years ago, they decided that life on the surrounding altiplano was just too harsh, so they put the city at the bottom of quite substantial canyon. Understandible really - it is pretty frikkin cold up there! Deep in the canyon (and I mean deep - its more than 500m vertical from the top to the bottom in places), the city is sheltered from the biting wind, and gets some benefits from being closed in - even if it doesn´t get quite as much sun. And of course, 500m less altitude means slightly more warmt, and slightly more air to breathe too! The net result is that the skyscrapers of the central city and the wealthy suburbs of corrupt former bolivian politicians (a local´s words, not mine!) are at the bottom of the canyon, whereas the poverty stricken areas are high up on the hill, with a great view, but a rather harsher climate.

Our four days in La Paz started with a walking tiki-tour around the city - its a reasonably nice city, but at the same time its a lot more hetic and touristy than the Bolivia that we have come to know and love during our time in Potosi. The highlight was probably a little visit to the witches market, featuring more Llama fetuses than you can shake a stick at..

We also paid a visit to El Alto, the poorest neighbourhood at the top of the canyon overlooking the rich down below. El Alto is infamous as the source of much of the political protest that has occured recently in Bolivia - it is, after all, in a prize position to hold La Paz to ransom, as there is only one road up out of the canyon, and it passes through El Alto. Mildly ironic, you might say...

We were in El Alto on a sunday, for their weekly market, and it was a truly memorable experience. We have been to plenty of markets here before, but this was by far the largest and most impressive that we have seen. Basically, the entire city of El Alto turned into a market - every street was lined with people with stalls on both sides - there were literally thousands of stalls (and I mean 1000 or more, literally) and tens of thousands of people. And there was everything for sale there - chickens, geese, ducks and ducklings, pets, flashy lights for your car, tools, snake oil, live frogs, fruit, pirated music and videos, clothes, and even a line of Toyota Land Cruisers (Dorthe had to drag me away) in the car section. Dorthe and I spent five or six hours just wandering around, jaws agape, at what we saw. It was like a department store had exploded and covered half the city with crap...

But probably the highlight of the entire market was the man selling homemade potato peelers. Yes, that´s right. Potato peelers. We weren´t all that impressed - Potato peelers are, after all, a little mundane in our part of the world. But not here - here in Bolivia, they peeler veges by scraping the skin off with a knife. The man selling the peelers was surrounded by quite a crowd, and he was demonstrating how to use one - accompanied by the oohs, and aahs , a close examination of how thing the peel was (its very important to conserve as much potato as possible here), and general awe on the part of the crowd. Suffice to say he was doing a roaring business - we saw him sell five (Bs 5 each, US$0.67) in the minute or so that we were standing there. But then, odd little things like that are kind of what you expect in a back-to-front city like La Paz....