Some Brief Notes On La Paz

Loki: A pretty soulless party hostel with great beds. It’s a little Europe/Australasia party bubble. The incongreguity of no-one speaking Spanish, even the manager, in the middle of South America.

Vomiting in my sleep onto those same great beds. The shock.

The spectacle of thousands of different coloured buildings rising up out of all sides of a valley up to 4000 meters above sea level.

The Museum of Bolivian Contemporary Art actually being a collection of, from what I could tell, one’s man’s fascination with Surrealist A-Level Art, complete with (the not exclusively) adolescent obsession with large breasts in various states of exposure. Quite bad.

Meeting Narda in Plaza Sucre (which is virtually impossible to get to owing to the fact that it is actually a major roundabout and not really a square at all). Talking Bolivian politics and romantic art in a weird food ‘mall’ eating Japanese food. Watching a remarkably authentic Bolivian Green Day tribute act. Very strange but weirdly satisfying all the same.

Going to watch Manuel’s friends’ band rehearse in uptown La Paz. Encountering the Latin Janis Joplin.

Manuel’s face on drums (whilst improvising his way through a song he has never heard before). Quite special.

Manuel’s face upon first sampling an authentic Bolivian-English-Indian Chicken Madras. Also quite special.

Feeling as if, for health reasons, or I don’t know what, I didn’t completely find La Paz in some sense…like I missed something.