We spent four days in La Paz (3500 metres), a large sprawling city in a canyon cut into the adjacent Altiplano (4000 metres). The buildings hug the steep sides of the canyon. It is quite a spectacular sight. It is not the official capital of Bolivia (that is Sucre. Hands up all those who thought it was!) but it does have all the commercial and political offices as well as a lot of traffic, pollution and a population of 835,000. After our scary drive into the city we were glad to leave Gerty in the hotel garage for a few days. We had just completed 20,000 kilometres driving so she deserved a rest.

We were also pleased to have stopped taking the Malaria tablets as our dreams had been very bizarre. I dreamt that the local indigenous crop (Quinoa) was owned by the NASA space organization and had been developed for use by astronauts but they let the Bolivians grow it for free. So vivid was the dream that I was convinced Peter had told me. It took him a day to convince me he hadn't, though he said he wished that he had if I was going to believe something so far fetched.

On a similar note we visited the cities witches market with stalls full of weird things, including remedies for a variety of ailments and offerings to placate spirits and address imbalances in the spirit world. Spot the dried llama foetuses in the photo!

Peter couldn't resist going biking down the road from La Paz to Coroico. The road plunges from the city down to the Amazon basin. It has been named the world’s most dangerous road and been subject to several TV programmes. I couldn’t bear to watch so stayed in the city. The road was replaced by a new paved two lane road in 2006, which is 100Km long compared to the old 'death’ roads 65Km. It must have cost a fortune to build with tunnels, bridges and massive winding curves. The old road is mostly a single lane rocky dirt road. Where it has been cut into the mountains, water pours from above to make it treacherously slippery. In the rainy season it must have been terrible. It plunges 3.5Km in its 65 Km length and as a substantial part is level, you can imagine some of the hills. Other than serving a few now isolated hamlets it is only used by tourists. Most cycle down, some motor bike and some 4x4. Peter said it was great fun, hurtling down this track, with a 1000m shear drop on one side! The bikes were really cool, front and rear suspension and hydraulic disc brakes. They were so efficient, the brake leavers were designed so you could only use two fingers on them; they got a lot of use. It was actually quite safe, as long as you had the sense to stick to the mountain side of the track and concentrate on the road rather than the scenery.

Far more dangerous was the ride back in the minibus on the new road. As he got into the city the traffic was at a standstill, complete chaos. There is a dual carriage way that leads in and out of the city. Traffic coming out was moving at normal mad Bolivian speeds so the driver thought a good trick would be to reverse along the outgoing duel carriage to get into the city. Cars, horns blaring, served to miss them and when a bus missed them by mms, their howls of protest, convinced the driver to give up and go the right way along the road. Of course this was taking them out of town, so ever resourceful, the driver spotted a hole in the barrier at the side of the road, reversed through this, across a pedestrianized area and back to the side streets. 45mins later they were back at the same spot before he tried this madcap scheme. A while later, when they recognized where they were, a group of them jumped ship and decided to walk; much safer! A few beers later, in a great bar with an aircraft engine on the ceiling and other such bits hanging from the walls, Peter had recovered.

La Paz also has the highest curry house in the world, 'The star of India’ apparently run by an English couple. Unfortunately it only scored a poor 3 out of 10, 1 for generous portion size, 1 for trying and 1 for being the highest. Sadly lacking in all other areas!

We visited a pre Inca site called Tiwanaku, a massive religious site dated around 1000 BC and lasting till around 1000AD. Very little remains but they believe it consisted of many brightly decorated palaces and pyramids and a population of around 50 thousand. Its position close to Lake Titicaca and near Mount Illami (home of the most important mountain god) and Mount Illampu and Sajama is no coincidence. So influential was the site that the Incas made sure they were associated with it. Even today it is very important to the Aymara indigenous people and the latest Bolivian president even had a victory ceremony there.

Peter couldn’t resist a visit to watch Mexican style wrestling (Lucha libre de cholitas) between bowler hatted women and an assortment of masked baddies (men and women). They were all very agile and good actors. Every match started with 10 minutes of the goodie being beaten up by the baddie and for some reason the referee, then they would recover and beat the pair of them! Best of all was when a small young lady beat two men and got people from the crowd to join in and jump on the bad guy at the end.

Just before we left La Paz we saw one of their colourful processions. They do rather like these. We are not sure what it was all about but they seemed to be having fun.

We managed to get out of La Paz with no problems and headed to our last stop : Copocabana (3800metres) on Lake Titicaca. This was heaven compared with La Paz. We only stayed a couple of days, just enough to recover from La Paz and visit one of the Islands (Isla del Sol) in the lake.

So what did we think of Bolivia? Well you have to feel a bit sorry for them, the first Latin American country to declare independence from Spain, the last to achieve it, losing their coastal region to Chile in the War of the Pacific, a region then rich in Nitrates and now very rich in copper, a string of bad presidents, one of whom gave away a huge piece of the country to Brazil for a horse and of course coca a staple here, necessary to be able to work at high altitudes and declared illegal by the UN. At least now they have a good President, Evo Morales the first indigenous president in South America and he seems to be doing a good job, rooting out corruption and getting some order in the country.

We didn’t visit the Amazon basin; we are saving that for Peru, so spent most of our time above 3,400 meters on or near the massive Altiplano, which was quite tough going. Bolivia is big (the size of Spain and France, with a population of 10 million) and we only visited a fraction of it and even then we had to drive long distances between sites. The scenery was not as dramatic as that around the Andes, except for our time in the Salt Lake. The weather has been consistently warm during the day and cold, even freezing at night. The rural roads have been in a generally poor condition but the new government has initiated a big road building programme, so there were a few nice new roads around the main cities. The driving of the microbuses, people carriers and taxis has left Gerty shaking in her tyres. They are crazy drivers! The use of the horn is obligatory and seems to be an entire language of its own.The purchasing of diesel has been interesting but Peter has got into the swing of hunting it down in local shops and houses so that he only has to pay between 40 and 50p per litre.

The price of almost everything has been very low so we have mostly stayed in hotels. There is a marked absence of campsites even if we had wanted to camp. We have had to camp wild a few times because of distances between places but unlike Chile and Argentina it has been difficult to find an isolated spot as wherever you stop you are not far from a farm or village.

We have seen some pre Inca sites, colonial architecture, snow-capped mountains, the massive Salar de Uyuni and the even more massive high Altiplano and my favorite; dinosaur footprints. We found the Bolivians to be a little shy at times but always very friendly. Peter has enjoyed it –except the constant stuffed up nose (due to the high altitude and very dry climate) whilst I have found the poverty and basic conditions a bit ***********trast to Chile and Argentina- maybe I am getting soft in my old age.