Day 36

Luckily when I woke up my arm was a lot a lot better, it still hurt like a b**** but at least I could move it, and so my trip wasn't entirely ruined. There was a huge parade in La Paz that weekend called 'Grand Poder' which means 'Great Power' where people come from all over Bolivia to dress in traditional costume/sparkly outfits and parade down the street. It started at 7.30 am right outside our hotel (and yes it was noisy) with a huge marching band playing pan pipes/drums/trumpets/trombones. After getting dressed a few of us went and sat on a bleacher that had been put up outside our hotel to watch it. The variety of costumes was huge, although they all incorporated extremely vibrant colours, and many were covered in silver studs. Some of the men wore masks, and a lot of the woman wore short sequinned skirts, knee high boots, and plaited hair. It was real good fun to watch, everyone was singing and the dancers kept getting given free beer :')
After about two hours it started to get really really hot and so we went back inside and planned our route to the yellow cable cart. La Paz is over 4000mts above sea level, and is so densely populated that there is no room for a train system, instead they have cable cars which hover over the city and people can get to work, plus a one way ticket is 3 bolivianos, 30p, so TFL could definitely get some pricing inspiration from there. The yellow cable car is the highest one in the world and took us right to the top of La Paz, it's all built into the side of mountains and so walking is incredibly steep/tiring because it's all uphill or downhill (in high altitude where it's harder to breath)
The view was spectacular, and it was particularly weird because the cable car was so unbelievably modern (it's ever solar powered) but the rest of the town was not, all the tiny houses have metallic roofs and graffiti. I didn't go all over the city but I didn't really see a rich area, so to have something so expensive in such a poor area felt really surreal.
Then it was time for food, I took Claire&Selina to Namaste, because they hadn't gone yesterday, and because eating vegetarian food made me feel slightly healthier. I ordered peanut-Thai, which was good but I'm really not a fan of soy noodles, I like my regular wagamamas rice noodles any day