After all the excitement of rushing through Peru I took some time to hang around in La Paz and recover for a week or so, which gave me plenty of time to realise that La Paz is a really odd place! For a start it´s the highest capital city in the world, but built in a valley, which I wasn´t expecting. It doesn´t really have much in the way of large shops, but it makes up for this by having everything for sale on the streets. I saw men hawking overcoats and parasols, merchandise slung over their shoulders. I saw a guy selling two sizes of hula hoop, just walking along the street looking for customers. You can even buy dried llama foetuses to bury under your house for good luck. The city is full of shoe shine boys who walk around hassling you if your shoes aren´t shiny enough, and they all wear balaclavas. Old Bolivian ladies in traditional dress push wheelbarrows full of enormous popped corn around the steep streets, selling it by the bag. People dressed as zebras patrol the traffic lights to help people across the street. Every bank has an armed guard, and I´m not talking about batons and hand guns – you have to walk past someone toting at least a shotgun before you can talk to your bank manager. clerical types set up desks on the street with typewriters and fill in official documents for people. And strange as all of these things are the thing I found most interesting was that they had absolutely nothing to do with tourists! This is just how life in Bolivia goes on. Sure there are loads of tourists in La Paz, but apart from the tour operators that line the streets in some areas the city seems oblivious to all the foreigners.
So I spent most of my time in La Paz just wandering around, drinking coffee, relaxing, but when I heard about Cholitas Luchadoras I had to check it out. A Cholita is the traditional Bolivian woman, dressed in petticoats and a bowler hat, normally seen carrying a huge pack on her back, or pushing a wheelbarrow full of popped corn. Luchadoras are fighters, or in this case, wrestlers, in the best pantomime, staged fights tradition. Put the two together and you get tiny Bolivian women getting into the wring with masked, male Bolivian wrestlers. The fights happen on a Sunday in El Alto, the city built above the valley that La Paz is in, and the crowd is a mix of curious tourists in the front row seats and locals, bringing their kids along to boo and hiss the rudos (bad guys), and cheer the tecnicos (good guys). Most of the fights were just between guys, which were entertaining enough, but not what we came to see. One of those fights did produce the spectacle of Spiderman being set on fire, and having to run out of the stadium (shed). When the first Cholita vs. guy fight happened the woman took a hell of a beating! At one point the wrestler took off his belt and started whipping her with it – but he got his comeupance when she started throwing him against the ropes, and even diving onto him once she´d thrown him out of the ring! The final bout was the showpiece, two teams of one boy and one girl each, in a no holds barred epic. The rudo Cholita was La Loca, who didn´t like it when you called her crazy! Thing was, she was pretty crazy. While attacking her Cholita opponent she picked up a huge bottle of coke from the crowd, sprayed it randomly at fighter and audience, before throwing the other woman into the shocked crowd, kicking in the security barriers and starting to hit her with a chair – everyone scrambling to get out of the way! The fight ended with La Loca turning on her partner for letting the other team win, and then storming out of the ring having thrown him to the ground. She was something of a crowd pleaser!
I did eventually make it out of La Paz, but it took running into my Easter Island travel buddy Sarah to do it. She and her sister turned up in La Paz, and just happened to book into the same hostel as me! We decided we´d all head south for a quick tour, so we visited Sucre, Potosi and Uyuni. Sucre was a nice little city, that dinosaurs left their footprints on, or at least nearby, a few million year ago. After taking a look at those, we moved onto Potosi where we bought dynamite and went into the silver mines. The dynamite was a gift for the miners who work there, so we didn´t get to set any off, but we were underground when someone else did in another part of the mountain – the most almighty booms! From Potosi we wrapped up warm and headed for the salt flats at Uyuni. The salt flats are huge, the size of a small country, but so may tourists head out to them now, and head to the same places on them, that it´s hard to find a spot where there isn´t a group of people trying to take trick photographs of each other. Driving back across the flats as the sun set was amazing though, the ground still bright white as the sky darkens above it.
After the tour of the salt flats the girls headed back up to La Paz to climb mountains and then cycle back down them, while I´ve headed further south to Tupiza, which puts me under 3000m for the first time in a while. Somewhere near here is where Butch and Sundance got shot down, and I´d probably head out on a tour, but it seems like a sandstorm has blown into town or something. It´s windy as hell, and the sky is a strange shade of orange! Think maybe I´ll just hang out watching cable TV for a while. Next stop, Argentina!