La Paz

He landed in South America as a backpacker in 1995.

He left, he came back, and then he built a climbing company in La Paz.

Plenty of our hikers have stood on top of Huayna Potosi with his team.

For most, it's their first 6,000-meter peak.

And I talk to their parents, you know, and they must think I'm going all the time, you know, because I'm saying, yeah, we're going here now and now we're going there and, you know.

I think probably relatively spoken, it's probably true because you have been going everywhere all the time for most of your life, I think.

What made South America the place to stay? Because 20 years in La Paz, something like that?

Yeah.

have the same...

What I feel my happiest when I'm with the boys is when I'm in a city or I'm in a place and I'm looking out the window at nine o'clock in the morning, whether it's Medellin or La Paz in Bolivia, and I'm there going, how fucking mad is this? And how do I capture what I'm seeing? How do we get this across to people who are going to be sitting on their couch in Longford? Because when you get to a city like La Paz in Bolivia, it's like...

4,000 metres, four times the height of Carentuhal.

The air is thin.

experiences are...

Were there many white people about you? No, the indigenous, the Spanish blood has infiltrated the Mestizo.

But when you get to Bolivia, La Paz is the capital city of millions of people, 4,000 metres up into the sky.

It's like being and looking into valleys of Mount Everest.

I mean, there's just so much to do.

Ava said we should fly into La Paz first.

She said it was an interesting city.

She said it was fun just to walk around the markets.

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun.

And then I heard that Bolivia has the world's most dangerous road.

It runs from La Paz to the Amazon or something.

So we could always take a bus ride along that.

The place is the busiest of all the ports between Valparaiso and Panama, and sends northward through the Panama Canal valuable cargoes of the nitrate, borax, copper, tin, and other minerals from the regions at its back.

My route from La Paz in Bolivia to Oruro was the same I took years ago, when I rode for three days over the plateau on the top of a mail wagon.

We pelted the mule's ears with stones and kept them on the gallop from daylight to dark.

It was so cold we almost froze at the rude ends of the highlands.

Now and then we passed an Indian village, and always there were the scattered huts of the Aymaras spotting the plain, round in shape, many with roofs made of mud bricks symmetrically laid.

At one of the stations where we stopped to pick up our dining car, we saw a great drove of llamas.

They had brought fuel to the railroad for shipment to La Paz, and were about to start back with a load of merchandise to a town in the hills.

The fuel was what I might call Bolivian cordwood.

are, man.

Hey, so you are, are you back in La Paz?

Yes, we just arrived like one, no, like two hours ago from Copacabana.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What was your, what was your experience compared to Columbia, for example?

really cool questions and because during these five days i've been trying to figure out what what is the thing that i'm seeing that makes different base makes bolivia looks different than colombia and at some point i realized that there's not too much difference differences uh between the way uh we just we are part of the same continent and we have like same habits like horrible traffic uh a lot of 40 things like that but at the same time when you start like singing like going in in a little bit like deeper into the streets and talking with people or so do you realize like that I mean, the first impression from La Paz is like you see that everything looks like an impoverished neighborhood.

So because of the structure of the constructions, because their houses are built in the hills.

In the late afternoon, I drove up to Alto Putri, the junction on Ruta 11 CH about 5 kilometers uphill from the village.

This is where the international buses to La Paz often stop and drivers drop passengers for the walk down into town.

I stood there for a while, looking at the road that connects us to the rest of the continent, thinking about the flow of people and goods.

The bus services, like La Paloma, are lifelines for those without cars, running daily from Arica, but they operate on schedules that feel ancient, leaving at dawn and returning in the early afternoon.