La Paz and Choro Treck

Heading to La Paz from Arica is a 8-9 hour journey, but due to an accident with several deads and the road constructions in between, it took us 11 h to get there... so instead of arriving at daylight, we arrived around 20.00 in the dark. The good thing is the splendid view over the illuminated la paz, the bad thing is that at night it's less secure... Luckily we had booked a hostal so we grabbed a cab that drove us directly to the hostal Republica.

As usual, we spent the first day in a new city with sight-seeing and organizing the next days. La Paz has actually a bad reputation, since we like this city a lot, it's pretty special and has very interesting corners and we feel safer than e.g. in Quito. In the evening, we had our first bolivian menue (actually we went to an indian restaurant) which was great (and a lot).

Our next day was a "la paz on foot tour" (only for the two of us), where we walked from the altiplato "El Alto" down into the city centre. We visited markets, carneval shops (there is plenty of them) a museum of music instruments and finally, we ended up at the south part of La Paz which is completely different from the rest since here, the rich people live (it looks like a western european city). Great tour but tireing!

La Paz

Illimani

Mummi in the music instrument museum

Close to La Paz is the archeological site of Tiahuanaco, a pre inca civilisation. we booked a "dummy tourist tour" but it was a great trip finally. We got picked up by our tourguide and collected the rest of the group: 4 brasilians, 2 chilenians and two from the UK. Tiahuanaco is worth a visit since it's a great place but the presentation of the artefacts is not too good. But Victor from Brazil entertained all in the bus (with his funny spanish, his stories and his funny ideas).
The way back was hilarious, talking about a lot of non-sense things, and we decided to have dinner all together (the 4 brasilians and the two of us). So we wanted to meat at 20.00 in an Argentinian Grill restaurant (due to the heavy traffic we arrived at 20.45) where we had great meat and delicious wine. After the dinner we went close to our hostal to a party hostal called the wild rover where we had some beers and some more fun :-) before we went to bed (good preparation for the 3 day hike we booked).

Sun Gate

 

At El Arriero

After a short night, we packed our stuff for the 3 day choro track, starting at la cumbre at around 4900m and trailing donw an old path to Chairo on 1400m altitude. At the beginning, it's freezing cold an no vegetation at all, then some gras land appears, little bushes, followed by small trees, clowd forrest and subtropical forrest at the very end. We were accompanied by our guide and a cook that prepared the delicious lunches and dinners and it was a great trip. There is hardly any other tourists in this area at the moment and our guide Daniel was very good!

El Choro Treck

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Broken Bridge

One of the highlights was a about 90 year old Japanese that owns a remote hostal / camping ground. he's collecting postals and he has a vast set of pictures of all over the world. We spent some time with him, looking at swiss postcards and a picture-book of the Bodensee (very funny).

Not to funny were all the insects in the lower area (horse flys / Bremsen) that are ubiquitous :-( at some places, the chickens try to catch the horse flys but they mostly mis (we guess since they dont see enought ) but we survived and had a great trip!

El Japanese

50 % of all our meat

In the evening, our mood was for food, so we went to the el Arriero (Arg. Grill) again! This time, we ordered a 400g sirloin steak (entrecote) and 300g of filet .... very tasty! it comes with salad and fries (and for a strange reason with rice pudding), but you have to fokus on the important things... on the meat :-)

so, what's next? Tomorrow, we head to Sorata, a small town in the mountains, for hiking. There are several options and we'll see what we do exactly there!