La Paz - Bolivia's capital - is an incredibly lively, colourful, bustling city with loads of character. From around 4060m at its highest point to 3100m at its lowest (the better off you are, the lower down you live), the city sprawls across a huge valley surrounded by massive snow-capped mountains, and it looks amazing. Because La Paz sometimes seems to be so full of bustling people and honking taxis and in-your-face street-sellers and things going on it can be a difficult city to really relax in, and tiring to look around, but it's got a great atmosphere, and there's a lot of energy, and all sorts to see.
What to Do
And because there is such a buzz to it La Paz is a great city just to have a wander around - past all the street-sellers and salteña stands and traditional women wearing colourful Aymara dress, who in turn walk past the trendy businessmen wearing suits and sunglasses, and the markets and witchcraft stalls and the little minibuses on the main road, which constantly holler their fares and destinations as they drive along. And the people dressed up in zebra costumes who stand on - ha ha - the zebra crossings and are like the Bolivian equivalent of lollipop ladies. They're great.
The one main road in La Paz goes straight through the centre of the city - known in this central section as El Prado - from the plaza San Francisco (the San Francisco church looks quite pretty on the outside but is actually rather plain inside), down to the plaza del Estudiante, which is near the University. The really steep calle Sagarnaga - which goes straight up past the San Francisco church - appears to be a street entirely designed for tourists: it's filled with artesania shops, cafes, cheap international call centres and tour operators. Calle Linares, which bisects Sagarnaga, is a lovely little cobbled street to stroll along, with more artesania shops, and lots of instrument shops, and the witches market (mercado de hechiceria) at the other end. The witches market has its own particularly distinct smell and consists of a number of stalls covered with herbs, potions, llama foetuses, little amulets and distrustful-looking Aymara women, who will nevertheless explain what you might wish to buy for health, wisdom, love, and so on, if you happen to be lacking in something. Above these streets is the black market (mercado negro), which is more interesting for its atmosphere than its produce, but is quite fun to get lost in.
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I haven't been around half of La Paz's many museums, but these few I did particularly like:
Instrument museum (museo de los instrumentos musicales)
I love the instrument museum. It's on a really sweet, colourful, cobbled little street, calle Jaen, and it costs only 5 bolivianos (30p). (The guidebook tells me that there are also four other little museums on calle Jaen, so obviously it is the street to be on.) The majority of the instruments in the museum are Andean - the first room contains pre-Hispanic clay panpipes (and an obligatory mummy), the second charangos, the third percussion, the fourth flutes and panpipes and some really long funny trumpet things. But there's also a room with instruments from all over the world, and a room of random inventions (such as a pentagonal guitar with five necks. You have to wonder what someone is going to do with an instrument like that - apart from put it in a museum, I suppose). The museum also has an interactive, child-friendly element and there are lots of instruments - drums and bottle chimes and a pedal organ and the inside of a piano - to have a go on and make lots of noise.
Coca museum (museo de la coca)
The coca museum is also a great little place. It was set up to try and relieve ignorance about coca: its effects, its uses and its negative associations with cocaine. Coca is an incredibly important part of traditional society in the Andes - it's bound up with so many different beliefs, it's always used in rituals and offerings, it's chewed when working to suppress hunger and provide energy, it's been proven to regulate blood sugar levels and all sorts of other good things besides - none of which the US, though, seems to have got a grip on when trying to ban its growth (why not bypass the dangerous drug barons - the people who are actually making the cocaine - when there are harmless peasant farmers to target instead? They'll certainly put up less of a fight).
But anyway. All of this is explained properly in the museum. It's a tiny little room with photos and displays and explanations in Spanish, but all you really need to do is sit down on one of the benches and read the book (of English translations) that they give you when you walk in. This might sound like a dull way of seeing a museum (or perhaps more dull than usual), but it's actually really informative and full of interesting stuff: about the history of coca's use in society, and in the mines, and in coca cola and the pharmaceutical industry, and among other things there's even a detailed explanation of how to make cocaine.
MUSEF (museo de etnografía y folklore)
MUSEF is a more conventional sort of Andean museum (i.e. pots and mummies), but it's done really well, and it's free. They've got a fantastic mask display, and a room full of stuff from the lowlands with lots of feathers, and a big room of pots, and some weavings. And probably some other things besides, but I can't remember what. And a good café.
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Biking
Cycling down what is officially 'the world's most dangerous road', just outside of La Paz, seems to be a surprisingly popular thing to do. According to the Lonely Planet guidebook an average of 26 vehicles used to go over the edge each year, which is about one every two weeks, although now that a new route has been built 'the world's most dangerous road' no longer has any traffic on it, just cyclists. It's a downhill trip into the tropical valleys surrounding Corico (at an altitude of 1750m), along a track which is only about 3m wide in places, with a sheer drop on one side. A company such as Downhill Madness will provide you with a buffet lunch, hot shower and swimming pool in Corico, at the end of the bike ride, before driving you back up to La Paz. It sounds like good fun, although I haven't done it, because I didn't want to cycle off the edge of the road and fall to my death. The photos that I've seen however look both terrifying and spectacular, and the scenery must be amazing.
Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking is also supposed to be another very good company, and they do other biking trips too which don't involve such perilous routes.
Outside of La Paz
There are lots of tour operators all over the place offering half or whole day excursions outside of the city. They can take you to such places as Tihuanaco (ancient ruins from around AD 1000, lots of bits of stone and things), the Valley of the Moon (bizarre rock formations and cacti), or to climb 100m up to the top of the mountain Chacaltaya, which is 5395m high and so probably not advisable unless you don't mind getting seriously out of breath and potentially throwing up on the way. I haven't actually done any of these things and so am purely speaking through the guidebook, but any tour operator on calle Sagarnaga can probably tell you all about it.
Accommodation
The first time I came to La Paz we stayed in a particularly unremarkable hostal on calle Illampu, whose name I can't remember but I wouldn't recommend it anyway - the second time in a friend's flat - and the third time in Arty's guesthouse, which was fab, and so I stayed there for my fourth, fifth and sixth times too.
Arty's guesthouse is nice and quiet - despite being on a really busy main road - and attracts the sort of travellers who don't want to go out and get pissed every night (there's a curfew of around 11:30/12pm). It's in a great position, halfway between the main bus terminal and the plaza San Francisco, about a 10 minute walk from each. The rooms are simple but nice and clean, and the beds are comfy. There are hot communal showers and clean communal toilets. There's a kitchen, a lounge with squashy chairs and a massive TV plus DVD selection, board games, internet, a pool room and a little shop. Big fluffy towels are provided. And perhaps most importantly, the English-speaking owners are really lovely and friendly and helpful.
It's 60 bs a night per person ($8, £4), which is not perhaps the cheapest of places to stay, but for what you get I think that it's well worth it.
I've heard from my parents that Hotel Rosario is also an excellent if rather more expensive choice.
Food
My favourite places to eat in La Paz are:
Pepe's coffee bar This is a lovely sunny little café just off Linares. It's one tiny room, four or five little tables, with an even smaller kitchen, and they don't do much apart from all-day breakfasts, but the breakfasts are great. Museli, granola, fruit salad, pancakes, toast, bacon and eggs, fruit juices, coffee and tea…For 25 bs ($3.30, £1.70) the fantastic 'trekking breakfast' includes almost all of these things and is for particularly greedy people like Karen and I, who had it twice. (Although, to be fair, we did go trekking in-between. All the weight we lost through walking was simply put back on in pancakes and scrambled eggs.)
Alexander coffee Alexander coffee is a bit like the Bolivian equivalent of Starbucks, and so it feels quite homely. They appear to attract a lot of trendy business types. They do some really good food (breakfasts, and sandwiches and wraps and salads, mostly), and drinks and muffins and cakes, and it's all served quickly.
Café cuidad Café cuidad isn't anything particularly special but they do do really good thin soups (consomes), of exactly the kind that go down easily after an 18 hour plane flight, when you don't really feel like eating anything at all but know that you've got to. And they happen to be open 24 hours a day, all year round.
Angelo colonial Angelo colonial consists of a dark, candlelit room stuffed with antiques, and it has a really nice cosy atmosphere. The food is good too. (I would recommend the trout.)
Tambo colonial The Hotel Rosario restaurant is expensive, by Bolivian standards (mains are around 30-50 bs, $4-6.60, £2-3), but the food is excellent and to be recommended particularly for the complimentary salad bar. Good salad is extremely hard to come by in Bolivia.
Mongo's I think that we went to Mongo's for Karen's birthday night out; Nick, Dave, Taylor and Brendon were persuaded to dress up as girls (or perhaps they persuaded themselves - although Taylor, at least, needed some serious persuasion in the form of a lot of alcohol and hence spent his evening in Mongo's in the toilet), and our leader Paul (aged 42) ended up in a tight stripy tank-top and pink fingerless gloves, and had a finger-puppet toucan which he kept dipping in his wine glass 'for a drink'. All I can remember about the food at Mongo's is that they do good steak.
There's a big supermarket in Sopocachi, on calle Gutiérrez, and mercado Lanza also seems to be good for most things apart from vegetables and bread - but it has all the things you might want for a basic lunch or dinner, like pasta, rice, cheese, eggs, meat, onions. The entrance is right next to the foot of the curvy bridge going over calle Montes, close to the San Francisco plaza. If you walk up through the market to the back, there's a whole street of fruit, and there always seem to be a few ladies sitting selling bread on the corner of calle Santa Cruz and Figueroa. (Bread-wise, maraquetas are the speciality of La Paz - these rolls are sort of crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside (armadillos!), and I really like them.)
Eating street food is not particularly recommended, but if you want to eat really cheaply then there are cafes all over the place which do set lunches - almuerzos - for under 10 bs (70p), which nearly always involve a big bowl of soup and then a plate of meat with rice and potatoes.
Salteñas are something else that everyone eats, at around 11am; they're really nice little savoury pastries, filled with meat and potato and an olive and bits of egg and a sweet, spicy sauce. Lots of people sell them on the streets.
Safety
'CONSTANT VIGALENCE!' - as the impostor Mad-Eye Moody might say - is what is required in La Paz if you want to leave the city with everything that you came with. This might sound like a bit of a paranoid exaggeration, but after hearing so many stories about stolen bags and things I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that it's true. I've heard of two different tourists sitting on a bus and having their bag snatched from the seat right beside them, of one tourist who was in a restaurant and had his bag right beside his chair stolen, of two people who were spat at by robbers trying to steal their money on the street, of two more who were mugged in taxis. When we first arrived to La Paz a man ran up and tried to take one of our rucksacks; our taxi driver stopped him and was punched in the face.
I'm not trying to scare anyone, but La Paz is a city which requires you to keep an eye or hand on your bags AT ALL TIMES, because otherwise they'll just disappear. Be careful too about walking around at night - better to take a taxi (the radio ones, with little bubbles on top of the roof, are supposed to be safer).
Altitude
La Paz is the highest capital in the world, and if you're arriving by plane then the altitude is really quite noticeable. Effects include breathlessness, difficulty sleeping, something that's almost-but-not-quite-exactly like a headache, and throwing up, if it's bad. Altitude seems to be able to affect anyone and has nothing to do with age or fitness or health. But I think that there's also a lot of scare-mongering about altitude sickness and, really, most people are fine. General advice is to take it easy, for the first few days, and to drink coca tea (apparently it helps) and not to eat too much. If the altitude really gets to you then pharmacies will be able to give you something to help - Diamox, I think - or you could simply ask for something 'para ayudar con la altura' (to help with the altitude) and see what they give you.
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Sightseeing
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