UNBOLIVIABLE!

I have never seen anything like La Paz, Bolivia. The city makes New York look like a sleepy island town. My morning began with a dip in the ocean and then began the 8 hour bus ride through the Andes. Gratefully the border crossing was uneventful, another stamp in the old passport, and higher and higher we climbed. The scenery was beautiful; mountains and farmland as far as the eye can see. When we drove through El Alto, an extremely poor community above La Paz, it was a bit of a shock. At least it was a shock until we turned a corner and WHAM! There it was, the highest city in the world, built smack dab in a valley in the middle of the Andes in the seemingly middle of nowhere, Bolivia. There are buildings everywhere, built straight up the mountainside as though reaching towards the sky, or the snow-capped mountaintops in the distance. The city itself is a screeching symphony of people and micros and pollution and gorgeous architecture mixed and it seems as if every inch of sidewalk space is part of an endless mercado. You can buy underwear, batteries, a TV, bootlegged DVDs, handmade crafts and coca leaves in the same block, practically in the same tent. The altitude alone is enough to make you dizzy but the incessant insistence of life coming at you from every angle is more like being drunk. I loved it.