Peace out

La Paz


Some places on earth tend to stick out a kind of tenderness in me that is quite hard to explain. This is the case of La Paz, this city, as hectic as it is, didn't drop my into an abyss of oblivion but instead pushed me into a reality that keeps on striking me every time I crush into it.

After what I could call a deadly bus ride, I decided to catch a flight from Lima to La Paz, I claimined my luggage and looked for the nearest exit to catch my breath and -oddly enough- light up a fag -as I always tend to do-. Amazingly enough, La Paz welcomed me with an amazing view of what its named the mount Illimani -at 6.439 above sea level-. It seems as if La Paz was a city that dropped out of heaven and ended up falling into a mountain range, right in the middle of it...

There were two options to get into the city, one, take a bus which costs about 2 bolivianos or take a taxi for about 50. I doubted for a while until I realized the difference in currencies and what I was getting for a single boliviano. 12 bolivianos make up about 1quid, so make the math...
Smartly enough I took a taxi and headed for the centre. Apparently La Paz's airport lays between a mountain and the city itself on a valley in between various mounts... on the way to the city, most precisely in the middle of a highway from which you had an astonishing view of the city I felt extremely tempted to make some photos, assured by my friendly taxi driver -called Joaquín- that I wasn't going to get smashed by a truck in the middle of the highway, I was able to enjoy myself using my camera.









When I got into the city I couldn't believe what I was seeing, La Paz is one of the most chaotic city's in the world and to make things worse, there aren't any flat streets at all... (after all, they decided to built it in between mounts which makes it the highest capital in the world)... if I didn't get killed while taking photos next to the most important highway of Bolivia, I felt I was going to die a Shakespeare-like death by traffic..... if there ever was a conception of driving, civilization or civic morals in this place, it is gone by now, completely.

Luckly I survived -can't imagine how romantic it'd have been to be hit by a cholo bus in the middle of La Paz-.... Well, I'm not here to scare you off, I won't show you the chaos of La Paz -to tell you the truth I didn't dare to take out my camera in the middle of any single road-... I'm going to portrait what I believe made me fall in love with this city of hell... -or a step closer to heaven?, you decide-.