Day 26

Saturday 27^th November 2010

Happy Birthday Mum!!!

We woke early, as per usual! Franky had planned a day of watching the footie at Oliver’s, an English bar, so he trotted off with the lap top under his arm and a smile on his face at 8am to catch the early kick off (Villa v Arsenal).

Franky:

                  Finally, a male bonding day. I sat and ate a full English comprising of Lincolnshire Sausages… yyyeeeessss!! 3 cups of coffee later I was ready for a beer and United. Great day all round really, I sat with a Spurs fan who was still buzzing after an extraordinary week for them, an Arsenal fan who was chuffed with the early kick-off. The bar manager was a West Brom fan and everyone else in there had results going their way (Sheff Wed, Crystal Palce etc etc) so it was good news all round for the entire afternoon. We even had a City fan in who looked like the other guy from Status Quo and when Stoke equalised late on my perfect morning was complete. I skipped back through the lofty streets of La Paz to the hotel to meet Suz and switch hotels for the 4^th time in as many days.

I had planned to spend the morning with Sheridan and Paschael checking out the city’s sights. We had organised a private city tour for the luxuriously late time of 10am so first we headed out to a café for some breakfast.

Our first stop of the tour was in the South of La Paz at the Valley of the Moon. We drove through the city and realised that the southern part of the city was actually quite affluent – there was even a tennis club. It seemed a million miles away from the mania of the centre where we were staying. The divide between the rich and the poor in this city is wide.

The valley of the moon is an area of sandstone that has been eroded over time through wind and water erosion into the strangest landscape. It looks like a series of stalagmites rising up from the rocks.

From there we headed to a look out point above the city where we could take it all in. La Paz is the highest capital city in the world (3600m) and lies in a steep canyon where they originally found silver and gold. The city is vast and from the look out you could see it sprawling in all directions. The city is still growing fast out of the basin to create a second area  or new city called El Alto some 400m higher. The whole area is dwarfed by Mount Llamani’s snow capped peaks standing at and impressive 6350m.

I took the opportunity to have my picture taken with Paulo – our guide, quite simply because he had the biggest nose I have ever seen – and you all know that I see large noses on a regular basis on both sides of my family!!!!

We were taken to the Plaza Murillo with the Presidential residence and posed for pictures with the guards. One of them told Jaqui he loved her – I must say this seemed a bit forward seeing as they were barely acquainted. I’m sure you wouldn’t get that outside Buckingham palace now would you?

This square was filled with skyrats and kids feeing them maize – the Trafalgar square of La Paz! They suddenly all rose into the air en masse and we made a hasty retreat.

We had 15 minutes to check out a weird little museum which was 15 minutes too long. You weren’t permitted to take any photographs which seemed ridiculous as the museum contained no artefacts – simply models depicting the history of La Paz. Our guide was similarly unimpressed. He began by telling us what each scene was depicting and then obviously lost interest – his description of one being ‘ this is an old woman’!!!

Next was the Witches Market running through a network of steep cobbled streets.

This was properly weird – and smelt – a lot! Perhaps due to the dried llama foetuses that they were selling.

Seemingly if you are building a new house you should purchase one of these and bury it on the site as a gift to Pachamama (Mother earth). This will guarantee you happiness in your new home. They also had dried frogs which apparently would bring us wealth – I think I’ll just stick to the day job!

This should have ended our tour but Jacqui was desperate to see the infamous San Pedro prison in the centre of La Paz having read the book, The Marching Powder. So we were driven to it for a look. However, tours of the prison we banned 6 months ago. It is a fully working prison with at least 1000 inmates including women and children! You can still get tours, although completely illegal, if you are prepared to pay. The problem being that the guards have to be bribed to let you in and again to let you out – corruption at its best! It is said that the finest cocaine on the whole of Bolivia comes out of the prison as they have no access to chemicals to cut it with. It was an intriguing place. We were allowed to stand at the main entrance and could see many of the inmates milling around in the courtyard just the other side of a heavily guarded gate. The guards had at least 3 weapons each strapped to various parts of our body. Unsurprisingly we were not permitted to take photographs.

Our tour was complete and we headed back to the hotel to catch up with a very happy Franky. It would appear the Blackburn didn’t really feel like it today at Old Trafford and we beat them 7-1.

We had to check out and head to our new hotel as we are starting a new tour of Bolivia tomorrow. We were delighted to be leaving the pink room anyway. This has been replaced with an orange room at a hotel just around the corner!!!

We had lunch with the girls and bid farewell to Paschael who is heading off to the salt flats tonight.

We met our new group for a briefing meeting. Our guide JJ seems like a good bloke. However, Franky is not impressed that he will be spending the next 10 days with 5 women. Teresa and Stephanie are Danish but Teresa now lives in Scotland. Iris lives in Florida and Natalie is Swiss. At least he had his day with the boys at Oliver’s today! We had already planned dinner with the Aussie birds so we upset our new group from the outset by excusing ourselves from the group dinner!!!

We went back to Lunar y Sol as the girls had missed out the night before and had another good meal.

We also had a bottle of Bolivian Cab Sav (new Aussie lingo we’ve learnt so we will blend right in when we get there!). It was surprisingly OK! The girls headed home to bed. Despite being dead on our feet we headed over to Oliver’s bar for ‘one’ as it was Saturday night and we were celebrating hitting over 1000 hits on the blog. Now Oliver’s bar isn’t the kind of place you can have ‘one’ it seems. The barman and co-owner Kass was soon handing round a bottle of vodka and shot glass that every punter had to participate in. Suffice to say it got messy – and late.

We were being harassed by a very drunken Bolivian guy who claimed to be a lawyer. We weren’t sure about this but it was clear that he was very, very drunk and hell bent on getting more so as he chugged down tequila after tequila. He had his fiancée with him and kept telling us over and over again how much he loved her…. ‘ with his soul, with his bones, with his HAIR’. Now English obviously wasn’t his first language but she seemed genuinely delighted when he announced to her, ‘In the words of Jerry Maguire, you complete me!’ I didn’t have Jerry Maguire down as the best love quotation but what do I know!? At least it wasn’t ‘Show me the money!’.

We finally escaped him and got chatting to an Aussie guy called Gregor. If you looked up Aussie surfer in the dictionary he would be there smiling back at ya! He was hell bent on having a great Saturday night out in La Paz and it seemed he was taking us along for the ride. We had a new and fairly horrendous drink sensation. A piece of lime coated one half in instant coffee and the other half in sugar. You put this in you mouth and chew the rind off. Then while you have a lime juice, coffee sugar mix going on you throw in a shot of vodka mixed with kahula before removing the peel and swallowing the rest - Yummy?!?

Gregor convinced us that the night was still young so we went with Kass’ recommendation and headed to a club called Mongos. From the outside this looked just like a house but inside was a whole different story. The place was rammed – about half locals, half tourists and it was great fun. Another new drink sensation  awaited us – Frangelico. This is sweet hazelnut liqueur served over ice and it really tasty.

We finally rolled home at 3am to discover our hotel was under lock and key and we had quite job to wake the night time security guard to get back in! We stumbled into bed – our first big night out finally under our belts!