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I arrived in La Paz with half a kilo of trail mix and the forlorn hope that it would last me long enough to get my thirty day Bolivian visa extension, as well as a tourist visa for Paraguay. Before midday I had a Bolivian stamp, a Paraguayan visa, and an untouched bag of fruit and nuts. I was in shock. Where was the Byzantine bureaucracy? Where were the endless frustrations? I hadn’t even had time to be nervous in the immigration office. As always, La Paz was full of surprises.
I spent a night in La Paz on either side of my trip to Coroico. I had come for purely administrative reasons, but within minutes of stepping out onto the streets, my feet almost completely numb in the morning cold, I was remembering just how much I loved this city.
With all my business carried out so quickly, and having walked the gringo trail thoroughly enough on my first visit, I was left completely free to enjoy the city itself. I gorged myself on the vegetarian street food unavailable in the rest of the country. I ate at least once a day in a Lebanese restaurant. I found the best book exchange in South America. I made business contacts with tour operators and hotel staff. I peaked in at the free galleries in Sopocachi, the trendy, leafy neighbourhood full of students and ambassadors and transsexuals and punks. I ate trail mix in every plaza in the city. I salivated over the packed shelves of international supermarkets. I stared into the twisted, leering faces of traditional masks from all over the country at the magnificent Ethnographic Museum, where there are a hundred representations of the devil and only one of an angel. I priced and haggled over things I didn’t want in the witches’ market. At every twist and contortion of the city I felt overwhelmingly that I would love to live in the city.
At an elegant theatre of faded red velvet and private box seating I sat down to watch a part-traditional part-contemporary performance, and found that half of the crowd was attired in the same jacket and scarf as me. At a narrow bar behind an anonymous door I sat down to watch one of Bolivia’s more popular bands play, and found the audience a curious blend of all the tattoos and haircuts, all the subcultures and attitudes that are missing from Sucre.
I spend a sunny afternoon reading in plaza San Pedro, by the notorious prison. Groups of backpackers and a few rugged solitary gringos were skulking about, lingering briefly by the gate before retiring to a safer and less conspicuous distance. No touts offered them prison tours; these apparently are still unavailable, although I wonder how long before money wins out and tourists find their way inside again.
The sky cleared and cleared with every hour I spent in La Paz. By my last day there the high snowy peaks that surround the city were glowing in late afternoon sunlight. Before it dipped below the canyon walls the sun also gleamed off the many highrise that cluster around the main avenue running the length of the city. There are a great many tall buildings in La Paz, but none of them peak out of the steep canyon that are built into. The poorer, shabbier plain brick houses that cling to the canyon walls have better views.
When I hopped a bus back to Sucre I was hoping I would have another chance to come to La Paz during this stay in Bolivia. And I was hoping that I would have a chance to come back to Bolivia and to call this city home.
The bus left in darkness, the entire city reduced to twinkling gold and silver lights in the thick night. The gold lights denote streets, and the silver clusters are houses, but like everything else about La Paz this generalisation is broken a thousand times, the city defying expectation and imposition, and remaining full of surprises and enchantment.
It seems I can’t come to La Paz without getting caught up in some profound existential dilemma. On my first trip the question was of whether or not I would visit San Pedro prison (i wrote about that too, here); on my return it was whether I would cycle the world’s most dangerous road.
The World’s Most Dangerous Road, also known as the Death Road, was so dubbed by the Inter-American Development Bank, based on the number of fatal traffic accidents on the road. The road is a thin and muddy thing, wrapped around precipitous peaks and cliffs and linking the mountain passes around La Paz (over 5000 metres above sea level) with the humid little village of Coroico (1700 metres above sea level) in 70 short kilometres. Two vehicles can barely pass each other on the road, and with the thick mists and heavy rains that cling to the mountains, the slightest miscalculation can send vehicles plunging hundreds of metres straight down into the jungles below.
The main tourist strip in La Paz is festooned with advertisements for the Death Road; guided tours of the road are a combination of bussing and mountain biking down the road, from the frosty heights to the tropical valleys where hot showers, swimming pools and buffet lunches await.
Lonely Planet gives serious, precious page space to the Death Road, urging readers to choose their tour agency carefully, as a lax mechanic or slightly faulty bike will lead to almost certain death (they also report 8 gringo deaths on the road since tours started more than ten years ago. Compared to the more than twenty annual bus or truck accidents that earned the road its reputation, the probability of gringo fatalities is incredibly small). The recommended agencies charge more for peace of mind; the price of a tour is about the average monthly wage in Bolivia.
Since the last Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia came out a new and wider road has opened up, giving the buses and trucks that had so much trouble with the original road a safer means of descent. This means the Death Road is today used almost exclusively by tour groups.
When I arrived in Coroico I found myself one of the few gringos in town not to have cycled the road. Talk around the hotel pool was of how the road wasn’t quite as dangerous as adventurers had expected. The scenery was spectacular, sure, but where was the death-defiance?
I held my tongue and didn’t point out the contradiction between paying for the safest tour outfit possible and still expecting to encounter death and destruction. I also resisted the urge to point out that while the road might not seem dangerous enough to many gringos, to the hundreds upon hundreds of families that have lost people on the road, it is no doubt quite dangerous enough. The crosses and flowers that line the road (and every road in Bolivia) should be a testament to the road’s danger.
Today the Death Road is probably the safest road in Bolivia. It is the only road in Bolivia not menaced by speeding, drunken, test-messaging bus drivers. It is the only road in Bolivia on which every commuter wears a helmet, a reflective vest, and on which every vehicle has been tested and tuned before every trip. It is the only road on which every five to seven travellers have their own guide trained in first aid. It is the only road on which all travel is cancelled during inclement weather (the biggest bike agency in town strongly advises against cycling the Death Road during the rainy season, but in spite of this will still take you if you really really want to go). It is the only mountain road that is reserved for one way travel. Given what the road has become, cycling it is far safer than cycling downtown La Paz, or just about any other part of Bolivia.
Needless to say I couldn’t bring myself to cycle the road, settling instead for watching the stunning, changing scenery from a cramped bus that safely traversed the new road (and cost less than the per person toll for using the Death Road). Every tour includes a free ‘I survived the Death Road’ t-shirt in its package; I just couldn’t reconcile myself to the idea of owning such a shirt. How could I wear it in Bolivia among Bolivian friends? Where could I hide it while in Coroico, where for generations anyone wishing to leave the village actually did risk death in the back of a truck on that notorious and once-dangerous road?
So no world’s most bizarre prison tour for me, and no world’s most dangerous road for me. Another superlative activity passed up using the excuse of cultural sensitivity. I wish someone would put that onto a t-shirt. I survived the world’s silliest conundrum. I survived Bolivian bus drivers. My other car is a rickety old farm truck full of campesinos and potatoes. I chose the boring, sensible path and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
The name on the lips of every backpacker passing through La Paz, and advertised on every tour agency’s signs and fliers, is San Pedro. La Paz’s lack of superlative tourist attractions has allowed San Pedro to become one of the hottest backpacker destinations in the city.
San Pedro prison, located in central La Paz and just a short hop from the main tourist burrow, was catapulted to fame in 2002 with the publication of Marching Powder, which tells the story of Thomas McFadden, an Englishmen caught moving cocaine through Bolivia and subsequently left to languish in San Pedro prison, awaiting trial. The destitution and corruption a the heart of the Bolivian judicial system had spawned this prison, where prisoners were forced to pay for their cells, if they could afford them, and where drug barons lived in penthouse cells with cable TV. The families of poorer inmates lived in the prison, coming and going through the main gate, to attend school or visit the markets before returning to sleep within the guarded walls.
The entrepreneurial McFadden started offering prison tours, whereby seriously hardcore backpackers could visit the tour, spend the night in a cell, and avail themselves of the ample quantities of cocaine – said to be the best and purest in Bolivia – produced in the guts of the prison.
McFadden was eventually released, as was the book, leading to disintegration of the prison tours. Thereafter they have persisted as rumours, resurrected from time to time by enterprising inmates, and causing a headache for guidebook authors; how to deal with one of La Paz’s most intriguing sites, given that it was potentially very dangerous (rumours echo about of tours gone wrong, of disappearing money, and of the occasional assault), and very far from being legal. The current Lonely Planet Bolivia volume offers general details about the prison, which are no different to those given in Marching Powder, but no clues as to how to actually arrange a tour.
By the time I arrived in Bolivia word was out that the tours were operating more successfully than ever. They had been cleaned up and were very safe. When I finally made it to La Paz I wandered around the walls of the prison, and in the space of about fifteen minutes, while sitting in the plaza outside the prison, I saw three tour groups enter. I was offered the chance to join one of these groups, but didn’t have the 250 bolivianos ($40-50ish) needed to get in. If I’d had the cash on me I almost certainly would have joined the tour, out of obligation if nothing else.
By the time I returned to La Paz less than a week later, the tours had been shut down. There was no one in the plaza offering tours, and no gringos passing through the gates and into the prison.
A new word was out; an article had appeared in The Guardian in the UK, explaining exactly how to join a tour – who to talk too, how much to pay, and what to expect once inside. This posed a very serious problem; the tours were only possible while they were unofficial. They depended on corruption and blind eyes being turned, and existed only because officially they didn’t exist. An industry built on bribes and feigned ignorance can only function for as long as there is no public scrutiny. As soon as the tours were publicised and official, something had to be done to stop them.
Officially the prison tours were shut down as part of an effort to combat the corruption about the prison. Unofficially, rumours got about that the official powers of the prison were unhappy with their cut of the now officially advertised prices.
And further in the distance lurked another fact; Brad Pitt has bought the rights to Marching Powder, and his production company is currently completing a film adaptation of the book. When this is released San Pedro will become very much public knowledge, and it will be next to impossible to deny the cocaine labs, the bribed guards and officially illegal prison tours that are all a daily reality of life in San Pedro.
And for me there is the ongoing conundrum; I feel obliged to visit San Pedro, to prove myself a consummate traveller by visiting the prison and writing about it. But on the other hand I have no desire to be one of these parasitic gringos who bribe guards, enter the prison, and so become a part of the whole problem of the corrupt Bolivian judicial and penal systems. Every Bolivian I have heard talk about San Pedro speaks about it with a kind if embarrassed bafflement; why would all these gringos on limited time and money, bother visiting one of the ugliest, most corrupt places in their country. Every gringo, on the other hand, talks about the prison as the ultimate exotic destination; a mixture of crime and violence and drugs and a world very different to the one back home.
For now I find myself siding with the Bolivians. Ten days ago I would have visited the prison, and almost did. Now it seems like just another over-exploited tourist trap, which does more harm than good to the people of Bolivia.
(Later I wrote an update on the San Pedro prison tours…)
Arriving in La Paz was not like arriving in a new city. I had read and researched enough about it, and poured over enough coffee table books, that the picture of the city that I had in my head was pretty close to the real thing. Except that the city in my head wasn’t nearly spectacular enough. Nor did it make me feel happy like real La Paz.
The bus crawled through El Alto as it approached La Paz. El Alto, one of the fastest growing cities of South America, ‘the Aymara capital of the world’, a city fed by the poverty of the countryside and the lure of La Paz, which shelters in a canyon below El Alto. There is no dividing line between the two cities, there is just a toll booth and the dramatic descent into La Paz.
Hanging from the street lamps in one of the main streets if El Alto were lynched mannequins, which I’d read were strung up by local, informal, law enforcement groups (i.e. vigilantes) when they took over the business of security in an area of the city. I had written about all this before, so there was no surprise in seeing the dangling humanoid forms, which in some ways is a pity. The more you learn, the more you engage with a culture, the less exotic it becomes.
La Paz still had plenty of secret sublimity though. I’d read all about the descent into the city too, but it was still amazing; twisting and coiling down steep roads, the entire city laid out below, imposing black mountains looming up into the sky behind.
La Paz had been founded in the canyon by the Spanish because there were traces of gold in the river that ran along the canyon floor. Today the gold is gone, and the river has been paved over to conceal the human, animal, vegetable and machine pollution that runs thickly through it. And La Paz has evolved into a unique city, a cosmopolitan centre that still observes ancient pre-Colombian traditions (often blended with more recent developments like Catholicism and Industrialisation).
After the elegant quiet of Sucre, La Paz was stunningly rich in colours, details, smells and sounds, in the absurd and the profound, in the new and the ancient. It is impossible to walk in a straight line in La Paz; the streets are too twisted and narrow, the sidewalks too crowded with people, the streets too choked with traffic. From the door of every bus and van hangs a man or woman or child chattering out an incomprehensible list of destinations and prices. People in full zebra costumes caper in the intersections and direct traffic, reprimanding and educating the terrible drivers of La Paz.
In La Paz I ate vegetarian salteñas, which the rest of the country would consider either inconceivable or diabolical. I tried to strike up conversation with inscrutable, intransigent vendors in the witches’ market, where dried llama foetuses, stone talismans, jaguar skins and fake money are all for sale. I tried to end conversations with balaclavaed shoeshine boys which consisted mostly of ‘what’s that?’ and ‘give it to me’. I got lost in Zona Sur, a district surrounded by colourful ravines, where the rich people live, where hair is blonder, boobs are bigger, and everything looks American.
On the first of my brief jaunts through the city I was lucky enough to stay with Alfonso, a new initiate into couchsurfing who had photos of himself with Fidel Castro and Lula of Brazil on his wall, and who told me that the longest conversation he had ever had with a Korean was with Kim Il-Sung, former dictator of North Korea. I’m still not exactly sure what Alfonso does, but he was patient with my Spanish, generous with his hospitality, and hugely knowledgeable about his country. I learned a great deal. Perhaps there will be even fewer surprises in the future. What other way forward is there though?
Out on the streets I walked, and was overtaken by breathlessness at the oddest moments. I could ascend an endless hill and then be caught out of breath saying good afternoon to man in the street. The altitude – 3600 odd metres – playing a fickle game with the acclimatised gringos clustering around the Witches’ Market and the Church of San Francisco – which quickly became one of my favourite churches in South America (the other candidate for this honour would reveal itself between my trips through La Paz).
La Paz was not the final destination for this little sortie; it was just the entry and exit point. It is a city that demands a great deal more time, time to explore its every intimate corner, to uncover its every twist and surprise, which lie in wait for even the most over-read visitors.
