Arrived in La Paz a couple of weeks ago, on first impressions it was an amazing city and it keeps getting better. I can't quite put my finger on what it is about the place. It's on the slope of a snow capped mountain, so as you drive in you get the sense that it's all piled on top of itself and looks very calamitous. And I can't seem to take a photo of it, there's just too much happening at once. It's greater than the sum of it's parts. Its like trying to take a photo of a beautiful landscape, it's never the same seeing it with your own eyes. Even Pazeños say that you never know what you are going see when you turn around. They even employ people to dress up as Zebras to control the traffic at Zebra crossings! Its really easy to get around, we wish they had transport like this in Nottingham. You can get a trufi (shared taxi) or collectivo minibus virtually anywhere, they all ply fixed routes for very cheap prices. You can get off and on anywhere you like, and you can hear their ´conductors´shouting out their destinations all over the city. Within 2 minutes you can usually get a vehicle to where you´re going, except perhaps at rush hour when it is a bit crowded. There is a lot of traffic (nearly all trufis and buses) and so at times it is a bit difficult to breathe, but that could be the altitude as well as the pollution.

We spent the first day walking around the city starting near the top of the hill at the amazing cemetery. Each of the dead has a windowed box for the deceased's ashes, some flowers and few keepsakes. These arrays of boxes stretch for miles and at points are mounted in tower block style buildings 3 stories high. It being mothers´ day a few days earlier lots of people had left little musical cards playing Fur Elise. Some of the cards were running out of batteries so it was eerie walking around the cemetery to this unsynchronised monophonic symphony of death!

After the cemetery we had a walk through the massive Mercado Negra then to the Museum of Ethnology and Folklore. This had a gob-smackingly good selection of pottery and weavings, masks and giant feather head-dresses, really, it was amazing!

While in La Paz we've been couchsurfing with Ronald, a Bolivian who lives in a big house that he built himself in the middle class "lower" lands about half an hour out of the city. Ronald is an amazing host and person who knows lots about La Paz and Bolivia and always made us feel welcome, we really get on with him. We're on our third visit at the moment and he usually has other couch surfers round so we've been able to meet some great people, even on a couple of occasions go out for dinner and dancing in the city! This was always a colourful experience...meeting his cousin Shyla, lots of salsa dancing, reggaton, table-based beer fountains, some drunken old men with their even drunker female "companions" ("its the Bolivian way" according to one of the men) and seeing people passed out on the pavement on the way home, having had their shoes stolen too.

The first time we left La Paz we headed down to Uyuni to see the Salars, the biggest salt flats in the world and a few other things on a 3 day tour.

After 13 hours of bumpy bone jarring half sleep on the bus with ice on the inside of the windows we arrived at 6am in freezing Uyuni. We didn't quite realise how big a feature of our lives this road would be over the next couple of weeks. On arrival in Uyuni the entire town started a protest against the lack of funding for the road. It's just compacted sand, like riding along a 4 hour stretch of cattle grid. The locals blocked all roads in the area and called a general strike. So there was not much to do but sit around and read for three days with no tours running, or shops or restaurants open. Fortunately on the third night the Prefect came to town. They held a very public meeting which was broadcast by a speaker mounted on the balcony of the government building to the community keeping the pressure on from below in the freezing cold for about 5 hours. We lost feeling in our feet at about 9pm just as the meeting kicked off 4 hours late. In between the musical interludes, we could hear them going at it from our hostel at 11, when someone finally came to the balcony and announced that the road would be paved by early next year.

It was quite interesting to see a tourist town minus tourism. With all the tourists wandering around like zombies with nothing to do! And then, when it was all over, seeing the place transformed again into a buzzing market town. But it was especially funny watching some of the tourists work themselves up into a tizz over it all! "We're being held against our will!" "We all have to contact our embassies! A combined effort is the only way we'll get out of this place!" "Tell your embassy to contact Belgium - they've been working on it for two days now!" ????? And then there were the ones planning 300 dollar midnight death runs up to La Paz! It was a very peaceful protest unless a road block was being breached in which case the scabs were treated to a pelting of rocks and according to the Chinese whispers, dynamite!

I suppose we were lucky as for us it was just time to sit around and read and even save some money! It was freezing at night (I had to sleep with my woolly hat on) but during the day it was really quite nice to sit on a bench for three hours at a time and watch life go by! One poor German that we met while on our bench, was only in South America on a two week holiday. He spent the first week in La Paz trying and failing, due to bad weather, to arrange a flight to the jungle. So he decided to cut his losses and come down Uyuni instead!

So in between ducking in and out of the few shops and restaurants willing to break the strike and freezing our asses off as soon as the sun went down, we had a very relaxing time. But the highlight has to be the train cemetery! Loads of rusted old steam engines on the edge of a desert with mountains and blue skies in the back ground. We took 'a few' photos.
With the road open we booked a tour for the following week and headed back up the road to La Paz for the Gran Poder carnival. Ronald had four other couch surfers staying with him so after watching the procession of weird and wonderful masks and costumes go through town we had a bit of a dinner party. All good fun but the highlight of that second visit to La Paz had to be El Alto market and afterwards the wrestling! That was the strangest spectacle I've seen, maybe ever! Those round little bowler hatted Bolivian women really going for it, WWF panto style, in the ring and basically anywhere they wanted in the tin roofed sports hall/"stadium". It was all a bit of fun, the crowd of tourists, easily outnumbered by screaming and smiling locals, just sat there gawping in wonderment or screaming with the locals - all with one arm in the air clicking away with their camera! What a sight! But I hope it was fake blood all over her face at the end! The ninja turtle was also a legend.

We ended up going back to Uyuni with Chris and Lee from Sweden, who were also staying with Ronald. The tour itself was amazing, but there's not much you can say about it, you really had to be there. We spent three days in a Toyota Land Cruiser driving through salt flats, deserts, mountains, lakes, volcanoes, geysers, hot springs and wind eroded rocks and magma. During the evenings I became invincible at 'Turf' a card game taught to us in Vietnam.

Sadly on the last night we had some dodgy food so the bus ride home was a bit of pain. Not helped by our bus driver who after taking a wrong turn tried to do a u-turn in the sand!?? We waited five hours in the freezing cold with the condensation freezing on the windows before a replacement bus turned up. And when it did it was too small. So I had to lie in the aisle for another 5 hours. With the food poisoning to deal with lying flat on my back rattling up that road, thankfully for the last time, I can say it was about as bad a bus journey as we've had! The rice sacks in Laos not even coming close!

It's all going to get much worse apparently as we head north into the Jungle. They say it's a nightmare bus journey, I shudder to think. But first I'm going up the big mountain/glacier Huayna Potosi 6088 metres, on Tuesday. And after that, we're mountain biking down the infamous death road. So, if we survive all this, Emily will let you know how we managed it. Seriously, I'm sure it'll be fine.