First stop of my trip is Bolivia. I’ve been to South America before, and Bolivia’s neighbor but I never been to Lake Titicaca. Bolivia is also the complete opposite of Miami. Landlocked as opposed to coastal. Mountainous as opposed to flat. And now it’s winter there, a break from the heat.
I arrived at 4am. And decided to use my Serbian passport for entry. While both American and Serbian passport holders need to pull a Visa at the airport, it seems Serbians only pay 100USD while Americans pay 160USD. So my passport saved me 60USD.
Got into the first taxi I saw and he seemed to drive like a 16 year-old whose trying to impress his friends. Constant acceleration and de-accerlation (for the speed bumps).
I did make him stop to take this picture:
The airport, El Alto International, is at 13,325ft or 4061m above sea level. This makes it the highest international airport and the 5th highest commercial airport in the world. The altitude was noticeable on exiting the airplane, my feet felt heavy and I was somewhat dizzy. But that quickly passed and I became noticeably starved! Apparently high altitudes raise your BMR by 15-30%.
So as you can imagine I immediately crashed for about 4 hours to regain some sanity when I arrived at the hotel. The view outside the window:
So after a Matte de Cocoa (a tea from cocaine leaves, I loved that in Peru)
I began trying to book my trips. First was the bike road down the “most dangerous road in the world” (apparently 300 people die on this road a year but it’s mostly fatal for cars, funny because to bike down the road we need to take a bus up it).
And then was my attempt to book a trip to Copacabana. No, not the one in Rio de Janeiro (I been to that one 6 years ago) but the town on Lake Titicaca. They look similar and apparently the one in Rio de Janeiro was named after the one in Bolivia, not the other way around!
But disaster struck. First, there seems to be some strike on part of the road to Copacabana. Barricades are erected and the people will throw rocks if you try to pass so renting is a car is out. On top of that, you need to take a ferry for part of the trip and that ferry shuts down at 7pm (it’s at Tiquina) so that rules out tomorrow because I will be getting back from the bikes too late. But on Sunday, La Paz has this “Pedestrian Holiday” where only special permitted cars for emergencies are allowed to drive from 9am-5pm.
So in the end my only choice was to book a private driver for 160USD to take me before the Pedestrian Holiday begins on Sunday (leaving at 5am). Ugh, what a headache.
I decided to walk around La Paz after sunset and marveled at some of the locals dressed as Incans (they’re direct descendants of the Incan civilization). I saw this a lot in Cuzco when I was there almost 7 years ago, but La Paz is the biggest city in Bolivia.
Finished the night at the hotel bar, had some gin with spices from the Andes and then another gin with spices from the Amazon (a portion of the Amazon is in northern Bolivia).
