La Paz, La Paz. Where to start? Having spent almost 6 months here I am head over heels in love with the city and the country it is part of. Bolivia is an amazing country. Trying to sum it up on one page of a blog will never do it justice. However I have to start with the Fiestas that seem to be going on around the clock in some part of the city. In essence they consist of alot of drinking and dancing, always with live music and often to the point where on a saturday night the city streets resemble an old testament description of Sodom and Gomorrah or some horrifically detailed medival depiction of hell. Men fighting, women fighting, dogs fighting, the streets smell like an an almighty urinal, drunken singing echoing around buildings, people puking and kids trying to lead parents no longer able to walk back home. But then if fun doesn´t result in a few casualties is it really fun? And do the Bolivians ever know how to enjoy themselves, despite the crushing poverty their country suffers from.

The photo above is of women dancing in the traditional chola costume. This outfit has been a fashion with young and old Bolivian women for more than 100 years. It consists of a small bowler hat (preferably with jewelery attached), a tasselled shawl, a voluminous skirt with what appear to be at least ten petticoats underneath it and finally a pair of see through plastic shoes. In La Paz you soon learn to keep out of the way of these little women as they storm along the street flashing grins at their friends and revealing mouths full of metal. You imagine them to look so square due to the incredible number of layers they are wearing and the fact that they often appear to be carrying all their possessions tied up in a brightly coloured cloth on their backs. Get in their way as they power along the pavement trailing kids and a sharp and powerful shoulder in the ribs will let you know that they are built like tanks and demand to be respected. When they are taking part in a Fiesta a whole different aspect becomes dominant. Dancing from dawn ´til dusk and drinking everyone else under the table, becomes every self respecting chola´s speciality.

Bolivians will use any excuse for a Fiesta. The photo above is one of my favourites. It is a dance competition between the faculties of all of the universities in La Paz. Many universities here are tiny private organisations that often have to enter the professors and the parents of their students to try to make up numbers. There a procession around a 5 mile course through the center of the city that lasts from 6 o´clock in the morning until 2 o´clock the next morning. That is 20 hours of dancing groups with their live bands passing continually, the entire center of the city shut down for a day, just to discover which university faculty contains the best dancers! The vast majority of the people taking part are about 20 years old, yet you will not see modern dance from around the world, only the vast variety of traditional Bolivian dances presented in amazing carnival costumes like those above.

More modern costumes are also present. More modern here means more extreme: for the women shorter and for the men larger. Traditional music is set on a pedestal here that it lost long ago in Europe. Even the grimiest skate kid will not only know the names of their favourite traditional songs but probably all of the words as well.

Young people here are very dedicated to dance and two or three evenings a week the road where we live comes alive as a large soundsystem is rolled out. Up to two or three hundred young Bolivians then begin to practice the Chaquerera; A very beautiful dance from the south of Bolivia demonstrating a strong argentinian influence. The music is dominated by the fiddle and echoes up and down the street as huge lines of people try to keep in time.
The dance is very complex and we have been watching people develop as they rehearse week after week jumping out of the way of any passing traffic.

La Paz is a city of huge contrasts. It is a city dotted with beautiful Plazas and amazing colonial buildings but also against this backdrop is crushing poverty. The people who live here represent every economic strata, but particularly the poorest. Schools here usually contain two separate schools: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. this allows the students to both go to school and work for half a day. The problems of living here are probably represented most clearly by the shoeshine boys. All over the city there are throngs of kids of all ages who will shine your shoes for about 7 pence. This enables them to fund their education.

A huge area of the city is taken over by street markets. These markets sell anything and everything. The food they sell is so fresh that it comes in from the country on the back of a truck, it is unloaded onto the tarmac in the street and someone sells it right there. The fruit and vegetables here are of a standard unlike anywhere else I have been. Cooking here is an absolute joy; with ingredients like this you cannot fail to make something delicious. The variety of the markets, just like the fruit and vegetables, is astounding.
There is even a witches market here, where they sell mainly charms for the animistic gods that have been incorporated into christianity here. Fake money to offer to the god of plenty and dried llama foetuses to put in the foundations of your new house. My favourite market here has to be the largest flea market I have ever seen in my life. Twice a week it stretches around the lip of the canyon above the city center for about ten kilometers.
I doubt there is anything you cannot buy there, from trucks and mechanical parts, to tattoos,pins, flowers and every imaginable food stuff.

The city is located in a canyon that drops down from the altiplano (the high plateau that the andes rise up from). It is surrounded by some of the highest mountains in the world. The city itself sits at almost 4000m, three times higher than Ben Nevis. Most of these mountains are obscured by the walls of the canyon towering above the city, covered with streets and houses that look as if they could be about to roll down into the city centre at any moment. Mount Illimani can still be seen clearly from many points of the city. As the sun sets each evening it is a sight to behold.

As the canyon descends to the south of the city you enter a very dry, rocky, cactus covered area that is a positive wonderland for climbers. I have felt like a pig in mud here; able to jump on a bus and be in a vast area of high quality rock in thirty minutes. When I first got here I met someone with a climbing rope they were happy to lend to me. I soon met up with a great group of local climbers who have been giving my spanish a workout twice a week ever since. Whilst climbing spectacular routes in high altitude sunshine.

The surroundings of the city are a part of what make it so wonderful. You are in the midst of some of the highest mountains in the world. But in a few hours you can descend to the tropical valleys that mark the beginning of the Amazon jungle or head in the opposite direction and you will be on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The wildlife to be seen in these tropical valleys takes your breath away everytime you visit them. Some of my most magical moments here have been spent following groups of monkeys as they travel through the forest. They glide through the treetops searching for the next tree that is carrying ripe fruit. Once they find it they stop and eat calmly, peering down at those strange humans making their ungainly way across the forest floor as they try to catch up.
The Plants are more surprising however, flowers that you never thought were possible, enormous fern trees and european house plants that have somehow grown to 50 feet around every corner.

The valleys surrounding La Paz are scattered with villages where a traditional pastoral lifestyle is preserved. This is a life practically unchanged for thousands of years. Indeed ancient cultures such as the Tiahuanaco suggest that there used to be a larger population on the altiplano than there is now. This peaceful life of tending animals amongst some of the worlds most majestic mountains and attempting to farm what must be the steepest fields on the planet is a harsh reality. In difficult years huge numbers of people migrate into the city in the hope of finding work that will enable them to feed their families.

Above these valleys lie the mountains that are, in part, what drew me to Bolivia. The beauty of them is just breathtaking. Watching the sun rise above them in the early morning perched in amongst the ice and snow above 6000m, makes whatever effort you made to get there worth it.

From the mountains you can descend into the tropics by bike. The route Erika and I took was called the road of death, for obvious reasons, it is a single track dirt road full of pot holes twisting its way down through some enourmous and very steep mountains. A new road has now been built however and old road is practically deserted. You descend over 3,500m in vertical height in the course of about 70 kilometers. The road clinging impossibly to the sides of enormous cliffs. As you descend the ecosystem seems to change radically every 20 minutes. Ducking as the route passed under waterfalls we were delighted to be back on bikes after six months without so much as touching one.

Having to leave La Paz was a hard thing to do. Putting so many things I love into the past of my life was not easy, I am writing this from Argentina, and I do not know if another city will ever imapact me in that way again. Saying goodbye to the climbers there was one of the hardest things to do, but I can be absolutely sure that we will keep in touch, and will see each other again at some rocks somewhere. When we rushed back into La Paz for two days to pack everything up and loosen any remaining ties we had a meal after a days climbing. We gave some old bits and pieces to Rolando, the only Campesino from amoungst the group (meaning he was a poor country boy), as he left. It was a filthy night, with rain coming down in sheets. The rest of us carried on drinking and an hour later he came back, drenched, having found somewhere at two clock in the morning to get us a bunch of flowers to say thankyou.

 Leaving La Paz for the last time was an emotional moment. As the bus climbed up the steep side of the canyon the city lives in, we looked out of the battered windows of our bus. Below is the view that greeted us as we left the city that had been our home for six months. As the engine ground and juddered upwards we sat silently looking down at the city and contemplating what we were about to leave behind us. We both left such large parts of our hearts there that I think we may well be back far sooner than we imagine.