After Copacabana we made our way to La Paz. Usually when we are going to these bigger cities the bus tries to arrive early in the morning or late at night to avoid traffic. In this case it was later at night. What made this journey unique was that we had to get off our bus and get on a ferry to cross Lake Titicaca while our bus was floated across, by itself. Doing this at night was a little terrifying but luckily it was short. We checked into our AirBnb in the Sopocachi neighborhood. It was fantastic, for about $30/night.
The barge is what our bus rode on and the boat in front is what we went on.
The following day we did our tour of the city. Rarely do you get to say that transportation was the highlight of the trip, but the cable car public transit system in La Paz is incredible. There are about 25 stations located throughout the city in strategic spots. All of the stations and cars are colored according to the “line” they are on, very similar to a subway system. La Paz is in the mountains at a very high altitude so subways aren’t possible. There are too many people and the roads are not good enough for a reliable bus system. As a result, they built these cable cars that fly above the city and they only cost $0.45 a trip. We found any excuse to ride these.
Our first stop on our line was the General Cemetery of La Paz. This was very interesting for a couple of reasons. The first being that the cemetery functioned as a public park as opposed to a place of mourning. It is so large that people walk through it to get from one area of the city to another. They might eat lunch inside of it or simply walk among the rows. We started walking through the cemetery for the “lower” class individuals. It is just rows of boxes/coffins stacked on top of each other. Each box can be filled with items, pictures, flowers, or whatever else the family deemed important to that person. The oddest, but admittedly funniest thing we saw, was a woman on a ladder lighting a cigarette and placing it in her person’s box.
The most impressive part of the cemetery was where the “higher” class of people are located. The monuments or mausoleums for entire families are incredible.
This is a grave, not a church.
Immediately outside the cemetery, was a very long and active protest happening. Since they were going in the direction we wanted to be going, we followed (at a safe distance) to the Witches’ Market. The market has all kinds of potions and spells that can help you with any problem you might have, whether that be to bring luck, love or solve fertility and money problems. You can buy snakes, naked statues of couples, dried frogs and turtles, aphrodisiacs, owl feathers, armadillos and oddly-shaped black candles. Probably the most haunting object you will encounter (there is no way around it) is dried llama fetus. We did learn that in order for these llama fetuses to have strong powers, they need to be ‘naturally occurring’ — i.e. they aren’t hurting or killing the llamas for fetuses, they come from problematic births.
We killed some time at a cafe on Jean Street (a colorful, colonial style alleyway near historical center of La Paz) and got some great pictures of this quiet area.
For the remainder of our time in La Paz we wandered around the city, ate some very good and really cheap food, and of course enjoyed some drinks before we had to take off to Uyuni. Overall, it was a short trip to La Paz but we are glad we spent a couple of days exploring this very inexpensive and easy to get around city.
The power line situation was a little out of control.