At 7 I wake up, but Arzu is not there. I am checkking online and see that she is active on Facebook. This can only mean one thing. She is in the lobby :) and I am right. Yipieee!
Now the Bolivia trip can start.
First we need to switch hotels because we want to stay a second night. In a side street not far from the hotel we get a whole apartment for the price of the hotel. Our things need to be driven by taxi, which we are reusing to go downtown. 3600m altitude are breathtaking, especially for sealevel-Arzu. :)
We are tourists again, taking the sightseeing bus. With a 30 min delay something that looks like a bus shows up and we get on board to check out the southern part of the city. The rich guys live here as opposed to what we are used to, that the rich live high above the city, but in this case the climate is much better at 3000 than at 4000m. The poor live on top with a great view of the chaos :)
Traffic in La Paz is dominated by the mini busses which function as public transportation. There are bigger busses which were already outdated in the 70s and make the American schoolbusses look like a luxury coach.
We drive to the moon valley and it really looks like we are not on this earth anymore. It looks a little like Bryce Canyon, verry surreal.
The bus that wanted to become a truck in an earlier life, shakes us through and through and Arzu makes the right comment: "I am sitting on a horse!" And this is exactly how it feels. :)
After 1.5h we are back at the Isabela Square and head for lunch before we take the tour of the northern part of the city like the good tourists.
We take one of the minibusses and squeeze in with the other Bolivianos. Very funny and we are reminded of the tuktuks in Thailand, at least when it comes to the carbon monoxide smell.
We have lunch in a really fancy coffeeplace and forget about the coca tea. Then we book a trip to Uyuni with a guy who is totally fascinated that Arzu is from Turkey. That is very exotic here, Germans and French can be found anywhere. The bus to Uyuni is overnight and has heat and Wifi. For me the first is the more important in this case.
The second sightseeing trip starts on time and we are looking at the city center, the bus is aching up and down the narrow streets and there are several times when we almost get strangled by hanging power and phone cables.
La Paz used to be a really beautiful city, but it seems like there is no money to fix all historical buildings. Most home owners apparently don't even have money to finish their houses and paint them. The biggest part of the city is still unfinished.
This is in interesting city, but completely crazy.
Looking for the Hard Rock Cafe we climb up the streets behind the San Francisco church and we almost choke with the car smells and the altitude. Those old cars really stink!
There is no Hard Rock Cafe anymore and you might wonder if there ever was one.
We go back and check out the San Francisco church, which is beautiful from the inside. It is not really old, which is surprising. And then finally we manage to try the coca tea. It is not as bad as we thought.
For dinner we want live music, which is hard to come by on a Tuesday night. We are back in our apartment having used all possible transportation devices.
Google, Lonely Planet, Foursquare... We decide on a restaurant close by, but when we get there it is closed. The taxi driver is not very helpful and we decide to go downtown, but then Arzu spots a Spanish place and we go there. Here Arzu is having her second steak of the day :)
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