Americas in 71 days - Bolivia

Endless Surreal Faces of Bolivia

Exec Summary

Bolivia which reminds anything from Mongolia in Latin-American setting to Salvator Dali’s paintings was the biggest surprise of our trip. Despite spending only a week here, we have managed to party with locals in La Paz, race downhill on Death Road, jump like bunnies on the largest salt flats in the world, gaze at lakes of surreal colors, run between gasping geysers and bath in natural hot springs with breathtaking views – and not only because of the altitude of ~4,000m (13,000 ft) ;)

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Death Road Madness

One of the biggest attractions around La Paz is mountain-bike downhill on Death Road. Our bike agency was called “Madness” for a good reason. The trips starts at elevation of 4700m (15,000 ft) on snowy mountains and finishes 60km, couple hours, and sometimes couple dead bodies later at 1200m (3500 ft) in a jungle. At its infamous peak, ~400 people died here annually. To raise the stakes, I partied with another crazy Slovak and couple locals until early morning hours the night before. Although we eventually found it safer than our trip to Amazon, this adrenaline ride would probably still qualify as insane for many people. In our book though: Definitely worth it!

Hitting the White Route

Other than being the highest capital in the world at 3,700m (12,000 ft), La Paz has another rarity. A bar called Route 36. Lines here are formed on the table rather in front of the bar. A gram of the white powder can be allegedly bought for as low as $15. It is probably for a reason some call it THE bar of South America. As you can imagine, getting in is not exactly easy - the bar moves around the city. We only listened with a dropped jaw to stories of the fellow travelers who managed to find it ;)

True North

In Bolivia, I decided that the last missing piece for me to qualify as an old sea wolf is a compass. So I installed one promptly on my android. To my surprise, it seamed guys from Google did not get it right this time. When I looked up to the sun, it was always exactly on the north according to the compass instead of south. It took a while and quite a few rounds of diligent step-by-step recalibration, before it struck me that on a southern hemisphere, the things work somewhat differently ;-)