I’ve bought my ticket up to Copacabana for tomorrow so I’m in a good mood. Partly because La Paz has been a great struggle and partly because I think I’ve finally got the hang of the city now.
I guess when I first arrived I had picked up some kind of cold virus in Cochabamba as I was almost always cold here. I put it down to the high altitude. However, when I was in Sorata and flicked through the local paper I was surprised to learn that La Paz is almost as mild as Sucre! Now that I’m back I don’t have half the trouble with what I thought was altitude sickness. Just as well, as I’m going up even higher.
When I first strolled down town, I remember the the constant stream of buses chucking out plumes of diesel fumes, while people cried out where the bus was headed. That got on my nerves. At high altitude the pollution is worse as there’s less air to mix with, and it still makes my choke sometimes. I was also freaked out by the shoe-shine boys who all wear balaclavas and baseball caps - all you can see is their eyes. This doesn’t inspire much confidence in my opinion, but the locals don’t seem to give it a second thought. These days I just stroll past the SSBs when they spot me, standing there like a zombie while pointing at my feet. I complained about them to my friend Wolf, who suggested that the easiest way to get rid of them is to let them shine your shoes! Doh! Well, I went out looking for them today after I got my shoes cleaned to test the theory. I can report that it does cut down the number of staring zombies, but not all. So it’s just something you / I have to live with.
The final part of the initiation was yesterday as I walked around Calle Illampu. The streetis popular with tourists as there are lots of tour operators around there. I went for a walk along the street to check it out; I only got halfway along when someone tried to rob me: a women approached me from behind saying that my rucksack was dirty. This, I knew, is one of the standard ploys pickpockets use: they put something dirty on you so that they can appear very helpful while at the same time the have an good excuse to start touching you while you’re distracted. The woman sprayed my rucksack with mustard. I shouted at her to F*** off (I wasn’t in a good mood to begin with) couple of times and kept on walking. After a few seconds I thought about conforting her but she had already made her escape. Something like this happened to Wolf and me in Mendoza. It caught me by surprise then, but Wolf knew better, who is much politer than me just decline the offer of help. The way to avoid all this trouble is to wear your bag on your front.
