The ride from Copacabana to La Paz was a short, pleasant one, passing crystalline lakes and broad vistas of snow-capped Andean mountains (and not to forget the herds of wild, fluffy Llamas). In the late morning, making good progress, I rode into a small, relaxed lakeside town, but unfortunately, the road had vanished. I have had innumerable problems with disappearing roads before, but usually, it has been high in the mountains or deep in the jungle, not on a major road to the largest city in Bolivia. I looked around for the wayward road and was about to naively ask a local, but then realised there was no road, only a bunch of rickety wooden barges to take vehicles the kilometre or two to the other side of the lake. I put the moto on the wooden barge, paid the wooden barge-man viente Bolivianos, then continued onto La Paz.
La Paz is a nasty, hard, Modernist city full of witches and slippery, Dickensian vermin who steal things. But aside from this, the actual location of this vice is pretty damn special, as the city is set within a deep high-altitude valley overlooked by an enormous wise, snow-peaked mountain.
The issue is that the city and the location are at odds with one another; there is just not enough room in the Valley for yet another, old-fashioned 20th Century, New World Modernist apocalypse. A city of two million feels like a city of ten million because there are too many polluting cars and buses crammed into a trashed grid system that doesn’t work because the streets are too narrow and in desperation, they have been made into an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque one-way system, thus rendering the city one dated Fritz Lang industrial nightmare. Small measures such as restricting car access to the valley, making pedestrian-only streets and getting otherwise handsome people on bicycles would make La Paz sparkle (and it is no wonder the Uros people reject this shit).
I only spent three days in La Paz, walking the streets, searching for something that resembled coffee, visiting the markets, San Pedro Prison (the outside), and at least one notorious party hostel (the inside), whilst trying to get a feel for the city and how its inhabitants engage with the world (and unfortunately I understand La Paz in this instance, through its aggressive, cancerous streets).
Travel is necessarily superficial, and my understandings of La Paz is likewise superficial but no one could ever accuse one of being superficial for visiting it (and perhaps it is the cracks within the Modern city that make them attractive and it’s the cracked ones that will possibly try something different)
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