#254. 26/01/05 La Paz

A wobbley ride to La Paz, Bolivia's capital and the highest in the world took longer than expected: rain seems to have washed away most of the roads (only about 5% here are paved). The city has a spectacular setting deep in a canyon, urbanised all the way up to the rim, in which is located another, donut-shaped city called "El Alto".

La Paz itself is crowded and chaotic - the most stereotypical Latin American city so far. The streets are jammed with people, balaclavaed shoeshiners (some sort of secret army?) and stalls selling everything you want from bandages to fossils ("psst, amigo, wanna buy a fossil?") to llama foetuses in the witchdoctor's market.

But it's all fun. We're staying in a hotel called "Happy Days", we had our washing done in somewhere called "Laundry Speed Queen" and we ate in a Chinese restaurant called "Jackie Chan". Fantastic.

Tomorrow we off to the jungle. It's between 18 hours and 6 days on a bus (!), so we're flying on the plastic instead. We'll be there for 6 sweltering days looking for monkeys, anacondas, caimans, river dolphins and god knows what other slithery or slimy things.