La Paz, Bolivia
Oh man, La Paz Bolivia. Probably the craziest city I´ve been to in South America. If you want to do stuff out of the ordinary, this is the place. You will either love La Paz or hate it. You could probably guess what side I was on.
So I stayed at the infamous Loki hostel. Loki is a chain of 4 hostels through Bolivia and Peru. They are notrious for big parties, nice rooms and tons of gringos. Sounds good to me.
The first day we checked out the witches market. It´s a market that pretty much has normal Bolivian souvenirs but it´s notorious for llama fetuses in jars and other weird little trinkets. I didn´t know anyone who would´ve wanted a llama fetus sooo I decided to pass on the purchase. We also dropped by the infamous San Pedro prison. Two weeks ago people were able to go on tours in that prison. This prison is smack dab right in the middle of La Paz. Why would they put a prison in the middle of a city? I have no clue. This prison was very special because it had a very interesting community inside of it. The prisoners families lived in the prison as well. Prisoners would have their own businesses inside of the prison and there were some very notrious characters in the prison. There was a famous book written about San Pedro called Marching Powder. Apparently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie got rights to make a movie about San Pedro. Watch out for that, should be a good one. Anyhoooo, the reason people can´t do tours there anymore is because they let a CNN reporter in who did a documentary on it which attracted even more press. Then there was a riot and somebody got stabbed in the prison. At that point they decided to stop the prison tours. So we went there just to check out the scene. There was a reporter and a cameraman trying to do a story in front of the prison but things have been so tense between the guards and the media that the guards made them leave right away. I even had to be super sneaky just to get a photo of the outside of the prison.
That night we hit up a really good restaurant where I finally found some good chili in South America. They didn´t have any in Chile. Can you imagine? Weird. Apparently that restaurant turns into a really good discoteca. I found that hard to believe because it looks like a normal restaurant. Things are defintely different in Bolivia. After dinner we hit up a cool lounge bar. It was a cool place but a very complicated night. Not cool, but they happen...
The next day, I was flying solo for the first time in my trip. My Italian friend left for Chile. I decided to hit the tour companies that day and barter the shit out of them to get some super cheap prices. I was quite successful finding a price that was less than half the price they offered at the hostel. One word of advice, never by tours or pretty much anything that they refer because they always give you gringo rates. This goes for anywhere in South America. If you straight to tour companies and barter them down you can get the same thing for a third of the price. Other than that I walked around La Paz and checked out some cool plazas. Another reason La Paz is a crazy city is its layout. If you check it out from a viewpoint it looks like a meteor dropped into the middle of the city. It´s a giant undulating valley of a city. Some houses are way high up on the mountain and the middle of the city is low in the valley. It´s quite the spectacle.
Some Canadians guys and I took it easy that night because we were hitting up the world´s most dangerous road the next day. Haven´t heard of it? Google Death Road and see what you come up with. This road killed hundreds of people a year. I´m talking skinny dirt roads with no guard rails, not wide enough for two cars and some sketch ass rocks. Oh ya, rock and mud slides are a norm for this road too. Their is a new road that is used by cars now. There are still some cars that use the old road so we still had to watch out for oncoming traffic. Soooo, we decided not to do it super hungover at 7 in the morning. That was a good choice. We didn´t want to be add to the 13 tourists that have died biking that road.
When we finally got to the top of Death Road we were greeted by a thick fog. I´m talking can´t see five feet in front of you. Great! This road wasn´t dangerous enough already. So we started off on the paved road and man, we were not taking it slow. We had to be hitting speeds up to 70 to 80 kms. We were going the same speed as the traffic because it was all downhill. I thought my wheel was going to fall off because that guy was spinning all over the place. With that said, it was super fun.
We then hit up a little pit stop and portaged to the dirt road portion. This is where things became real fun. This is where the roads were only wide enough for one car, there were no guard rails, rocks the size of your head, ruts everywhere and about every 20 minutes of riding you´d see a cross of where someone died by falling off one of the 100m+ cliffs. What a rush! Dodging rocks, holes, avoiding hitting other riders and taking those turns as fast as possible. We all started slow but definitely picked it up once we got a feel for the road. The road was mainly downhill with some uphills. We rode through a few waterfalls and got to see some incredible views of the valley and the mountain range. I managed to ride unharmed but some people in our group weren´t so lucky. One guy ripped up his arm, another girls lost her city (Haha, weird) and one other guy took a mean spill and slid for about 10m. Good thing he paid the extra for the knee and elbow pads. It took us about 5 hours to finish the road and we ended up in a nice little retreat for a buffet lunch and a algae infested pool. We didn´t jump in the pool...
That night we decided celebrate our own survival at the Loki hostel bar that is going on every single night. We ended up at the infamous Ruta 36 bar. People don´t go their for the beers, it´s more famous for its nose candy. I didn´t do any because it´s not my thing but apparently it´s pretty bad stuff cut with speed. I´m not really into three day hangovers thank you very much.
The next day my Australian friend decided to rock up to La Paz. We checked out the Black Market or lack there of and then made an attempt to get into San Pedro prison. We were going to try to bribe the guards but this guy from New York gets our attention and said he could get us in. He said he would get us press passes and it would be 50 Bolivianos ($8 CDN) each. He said only one of us could go pay for the rest of us. This guy was pretty sketch and we didn´t know what to expect but we really wanted to do the prison tour. While our friend is gone we meet a guy named Daniel from South Africa. This guy was in the San Pedro prison for three years because he tried to traffic drugs into Switzerland. This guy swallowed over a kilo of cocaine capsules and got caught. Brutal! Anyways, he tells us that it is impossible to do prison tours of San Pedro prison and that our friend got scammed. Sure enough, our friend came back and said we got screwed. Oh well, it was worth the try. But our friend from South Africa tells us about an even better tour to a Maximum Security Prison. He said he had a tour going on tomorrow. This was a tough sell because we just got screwed once, but I still wanted to do it.
That night I met up with some Spanish girls we met in Potosi for a Salsa party. Man, Spanish people love their salsa. I managed to get some free salsa lessons and got some solid Spanish practice. Pfff, I can´t believe people actually pay for lessons.
The next morning I woke to hit up the prison tour thanks to the Dutch girls waking me up. Thanks girls! We pretty much had some breakfast told some people about the prison tour and rocked up in a big group to meet Daniel. His ¨bus driver¨apparently didn´t show up so he had to convince a bus driver to drive us all to the maximum security prison. It was about an hour ride to the prison but we got to go to this amazing viewpoint at the top of the highway to see the whole city. It was way better than the first viewpoint I went to. So we finally arrive to this prison in the middle of nowhere. Well, in the middle of nowhere with a primary school right beside it. Haha, weird. Our friend from South Africa had to convince the guards for about 45 minutes to let us in. We didn´t really know what to expect. The possibilty of us all getting screwed over was in the back of all our heads. After seeing him argue with the guards we thought we weren´t getting in but props to Daniel, he got us in.We had to sign in and get a pat down from the guards. Well pat down for the guys, the girls had to take all their clothes off behind a curtain. We then met the infamous Lalo who we found out later runs the show in the prison and is one of the top druglords in Bolivia and perhaps South America. He had to argue a bit with guards again but we were able to get in fine and didn´t have to listen to anything the warden said, haha. We then met Lalo´s right hand man Frias. Frias was fluent in English and was our main tour guide. Our tour guide Frias went to jail for killing a man in a fight and he killed 5 more people in jail. Ok, so our tour guide killed 6 people but other than that he seemed nice. They showed us all around the prison. They had soccer fields, warehouses for woodworking, a gym, games room with pool tables and foosball and their cells were all quite nice. No bars or anything. Just normal rooms. What a weird tour though. Frias would show us a room where ¨two people would go in their with knives and only one would come out¨. ¨Oh and here´s our room where we raise our guinea pigs. Aren´t they cute?¨We then had lunch some of the prisoners. What a deal, they make us lunch too? It was pretty good too, burger and fries. While we were eating our buddy Frias who killed six people pointed to the cook and said, ¨See that guy? That guys is effing crazy! He watched the movie Friday the 13th bought a hockey mask and a giant blade and killed tons and tons of people.¨When somebody who killed six people points out someone else and says they are crazy....I get a little nervous. Some of us lost our appetite at that point, haha.
It might sound like it´s incredible dangerous to do the tour but they treated us like gold. We our a source of their economy. They were selling us Tshirts and little trinkets and plus, when you live in a prison seeing new people from around the world is a very nice perk. If they make a wrong move the tour would stop. But the biggest reason they don´t lay a hand on us is because of the zero tolerance rules. One time a prisoner slapped the ass of a wife of a prisoner. The husband got to decide whether to kill him or punish him. The husband decided to punish him and the punishment is to hang him by chains on the roof 15m´s high naked for 24 hours. THey said it happened a month ago and the guy is still recovering. They still haven´t seen him since it happened. So in other words, the prisoners were very nice to us. With that said though, there were some of the guys you could tell they had a few screws lose. If they act on one bad impulsem it´s very bad news for us. Soooo, no one asked for some more food from Cook aka. Jason.
After checking out all the different cells we went into Lalo´s room. Wow, this guy has a nicer room then I do. DVD Player, TV, surround sound. He said he was getting a computer in a couple of weeks. These guys get the ful hook up. Some of the prisoners have machine guns! Why do they need machine guns? Once everyone got in and got settled they offered us ¨dessert¨. Lalo had some coke factories in the Bolivian jungle that he runs from the prison. They smuggle coke in and out all the time. Lalo is one of the head king pins in the drug trade of Bolivia and he does it all with a cell phone from the prison. On a good day he´ll make $7,000 USD. These guys don´t mess around. They told us insane stories of the organized killings they committed, the killings in the prison or even the revolution they had a couple weeks before. These guys burnt cells, destroyed the place and held guards hostage to shift the power back to the prisoners. They said two weeks ago guards were every around the prison, but now they are not allowed in the sector where the cells are. That´s part of the reason we were able to do the tour. And Lalo´s connections in the government. The tour only has been legal for two weeks at the time. We were the second legal group to do a tour. Frias told me about his plans to have another even bigger riot where they would do the same and hold some guards hostages. He said to watch for him on the news because he was pretty much insinuating he was going to kill this time. These guys don´t mess around.
So everyone in the group sampled the dessert accept for me and the two Dutch girls. They said it was the best stuff they´ve ever had. It was 95% pure which is supposed to be amazing. We all pretty much chilled and talked about the prison. It was really cool, they said we could ask absolutely anything. My jaw was on the ground from the stories they told us. It was very surreal. The most amazing part is how killing and organized crime is such a normal part of their lives. They had some very interesting perceptions. ¨We are good to good people and bad to bad people. Anybody we kill, they deserve it.¨It was like something out of a movie.
After staying in the prison for about 4 to 5 hours we decided to head back. I was pretty much buzzing the whole time. I couldn´t believe what I saw and heard. That was deifintely the craziest thing I´ve done in South America.
The next day Matt and I walk around town and I grabbed my bus ticket for Copacabana. We checked out some stuff in the market and pretty much chilled most of the day at the couchsurfing place. It was with this American girl that pretty much let anybody surf her place. It was like a couchsurfing hostel. There were 6 couchsurfers there at a time minimum. People just slept everywhere. As you can imagine it wasn´t the cleanest place, understandably. That night we had a big couchsurfing party at her place. It was super cool to hear everyones travel stories. The cool thing about couchsurfers are they are more hardcore travelers. They stick with the locals more and do the more unique things. I´d say they are the best people to get travel advice. Matt and I headed over to Loki hostel´s bar to meet some people to go out with. We headed over to the Salsa bar I was at before with some cool Danish girls. We all had a really good night that lasted till the wee hours of the night. That makes it all that better for sleeping in the bus. I plan all this stuff out.
The next day I barely caught my bus for Copacabana. Lake Titikaka, here I come!
So I stayed at the infamous Loki hostel. Loki is a chain of 4 hostels through Bolivia and Peru. They are notrious for big parties, nice rooms and tons of gringos. Sounds good to me.
The first day we checked out the witches market. It´s a market that pretty much has normal Bolivian souvenirs but it´s notorious for llama fetuses in jars and other weird little trinkets. I didn´t know anyone who would´ve wanted a llama fetus sooo I decided to pass on the purchase. We also dropped by the infamous San Pedro prison. Two weeks ago people were able to go on tours in that prison. This prison is smack dab right in the middle of La Paz. Why would they put a prison in the middle of a city? I have no clue. This prison was very special because it had a very interesting community inside of it. The prisoners families lived in the prison as well. Prisoners would have their own businesses inside of the prison and there were some very notrious characters in the prison. There was a famous book written about San Pedro called Marching Powder. Apparently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie got rights to make a movie about San Pedro. Watch out for that, should be a good one. Anyhoooo, the reason people can´t do tours there anymore is because they let a CNN reporter in who did a documentary on it which attracted even more press. Then there was a riot and somebody got stabbed in the prison. At that point they decided to stop the prison tours. So we went there just to check out the scene. There was a reporter and a cameraman trying to do a story in front of the prison but things have been so tense between the guards and the media that the guards made them leave right away. I even had to be super sneaky just to get a photo of the outside of the prison.
That night we hit up a really good restaurant where I finally found some good chili in South America. They didn´t have any in Chile. Can you imagine? Weird. Apparently that restaurant turns into a really good discoteca. I found that hard to believe because it looks like a normal restaurant. Things are defintely different in Bolivia. After dinner we hit up a cool lounge bar. It was a cool place but a very complicated night. Not cool, but they happen...
The next day, I was flying solo for the first time in my trip. My Italian friend left for Chile. I decided to hit the tour companies that day and barter the shit out of them to get some super cheap prices. I was quite successful finding a price that was less than half the price they offered at the hostel. One word of advice, never by tours or pretty much anything that they refer because they always give you gringo rates. This goes for anywhere in South America. If you straight to tour companies and barter them down you can get the same thing for a third of the price. Other than that I walked around La Paz and checked out some cool plazas. Another reason La Paz is a crazy city is its layout. If you check it out from a viewpoint it looks like a meteor dropped into the middle of the city. It´s a giant undulating valley of a city. Some houses are way high up on the mountain and the middle of the city is low in the valley. It´s quite the spectacle.
Some Canadians guys and I took it easy that night because we were hitting up the world´s most dangerous road the next day. Haven´t heard of it? Google Death Road and see what you come up with. This road killed hundreds of people a year. I´m talking skinny dirt roads with no guard rails, not wide enough for two cars and some sketch ass rocks. Oh ya, rock and mud slides are a norm for this road too. Their is a new road that is used by cars now. There are still some cars that use the old road so we still had to watch out for oncoming traffic. Soooo, we decided not to do it super hungover at 7 in the morning. That was a good choice. We didn´t want to be add to the 13 tourists that have died biking that road.
When we finally got to the top of Death Road we were greeted by a thick fog. I´m talking can´t see five feet in front of you. Great! This road wasn´t dangerous enough already. So we started off on the paved road and man, we were not taking it slow. We had to be hitting speeds up to 70 to 80 kms. We were going the same speed as the traffic because it was all downhill. I thought my wheel was going to fall off because that guy was spinning all over the place. With that said, it was super fun.
We then hit up a little pit stop and portaged to the dirt road portion. This is where things became real fun. This is where the roads were only wide enough for one car, there were no guard rails, rocks the size of your head, ruts everywhere and about every 20 minutes of riding you´d see a cross of where someone died by falling off one of the 100m+ cliffs. What a rush! Dodging rocks, holes, avoiding hitting other riders and taking those turns as fast as possible. We all started slow but definitely picked it up once we got a feel for the road. The road was mainly downhill with some uphills. We rode through a few waterfalls and got to see some incredible views of the valley and the mountain range. I managed to ride unharmed but some people in our group weren´t so lucky. One guy ripped up his arm, another girls lost her city (Haha, weird) and one other guy took a mean spill and slid for about 10m. Good thing he paid the extra for the knee and elbow pads. It took us about 5 hours to finish the road and we ended up in a nice little retreat for a buffet lunch and a algae infested pool. We didn´t jump in the pool...
That night we decided celebrate our own survival at the Loki hostel bar that is going on every single night. We ended up at the infamous Ruta 36 bar. People don´t go their for the beers, it´s more famous for its nose candy. I didn´t do any because it´s not my thing but apparently it´s pretty bad stuff cut with speed. I´m not really into three day hangovers thank you very much.
The next day my Australian friend decided to rock up to La Paz. We checked out the Black Market or lack there of and then made an attempt to get into San Pedro prison. We were going to try to bribe the guards but this guy from New York gets our attention and said he could get us in. He said he would get us press passes and it would be 50 Bolivianos ($8 CDN) each. He said only one of us could go pay for the rest of us. This guy was pretty sketch and we didn´t know what to expect but we really wanted to do the prison tour. While our friend is gone we meet a guy named Daniel from South Africa. This guy was in the San Pedro prison for three years because he tried to traffic drugs into Switzerland. This guy swallowed over a kilo of cocaine capsules and got caught. Brutal! Anyways, he tells us that it is impossible to do prison tours of San Pedro prison and that our friend got scammed. Sure enough, our friend came back and said we got screwed. Oh well, it was worth the try. But our friend from South Africa tells us about an even better tour to a Maximum Security Prison. He said he had a tour going on tomorrow. This was a tough sell because we just got screwed once, but I still wanted to do it.
That night I met up with some Spanish girls we met in Potosi for a Salsa party. Man, Spanish people love their salsa. I managed to get some free salsa lessons and got some solid Spanish practice. Pfff, I can´t believe people actually pay for lessons.
The next morning I woke to hit up the prison tour thanks to the Dutch girls waking me up. Thanks girls! We pretty much had some breakfast told some people about the prison tour and rocked up in a big group to meet Daniel. His ¨bus driver¨apparently didn´t show up so he had to convince a bus driver to drive us all to the maximum security prison. It was about an hour ride to the prison but we got to go to this amazing viewpoint at the top of the highway to see the whole city. It was way better than the first viewpoint I went to. So we finally arrive to this prison in the middle of nowhere. Well, in the middle of nowhere with a primary school right beside it. Haha, weird. Our friend from South Africa had to convince the guards for about 45 minutes to let us in. We didn´t really know what to expect. The possibilty of us all getting screwed over was in the back of all our heads. After seeing him argue with the guards we thought we weren´t getting in but props to Daniel, he got us in.We had to sign in and get a pat down from the guards. Well pat down for the guys, the girls had to take all their clothes off behind a curtain. We then met the infamous Lalo who we found out later runs the show in the prison and is one of the top druglords in Bolivia and perhaps South America. He had to argue a bit with guards again but we were able to get in fine and didn´t have to listen to anything the warden said, haha. We then met Lalo´s right hand man Frias. Frias was fluent in English and was our main tour guide. Our tour guide Frias went to jail for killing a man in a fight and he killed 5 more people in jail. Ok, so our tour guide killed 6 people but other than that he seemed nice. They showed us all around the prison. They had soccer fields, warehouses for woodworking, a gym, games room with pool tables and foosball and their cells were all quite nice. No bars or anything. Just normal rooms. What a weird tour though. Frias would show us a room where ¨two people would go in their with knives and only one would come out¨. ¨Oh and here´s our room where we raise our guinea pigs. Aren´t they cute?¨We then had lunch some of the prisoners. What a deal, they make us lunch too? It was pretty good too, burger and fries. While we were eating our buddy Frias who killed six people pointed to the cook and said, ¨See that guy? That guys is effing crazy! He watched the movie Friday the 13th bought a hockey mask and a giant blade and killed tons and tons of people.¨When somebody who killed six people points out someone else and says they are crazy....I get a little nervous. Some of us lost our appetite at that point, haha.
It might sound like it´s incredible dangerous to do the tour but they treated us like gold. We our a source of their economy. They were selling us Tshirts and little trinkets and plus, when you live in a prison seeing new people from around the world is a very nice perk. If they make a wrong move the tour would stop. But the biggest reason they don´t lay a hand on us is because of the zero tolerance rules. One time a prisoner slapped the ass of a wife of a prisoner. The husband got to decide whether to kill him or punish him. The husband decided to punish him and the punishment is to hang him by chains on the roof 15m´s high naked for 24 hours. THey said it happened a month ago and the guy is still recovering. They still haven´t seen him since it happened. So in other words, the prisoners were very nice to us. With that said though, there were some of the guys you could tell they had a few screws lose. If they act on one bad impulsem it´s very bad news for us. Soooo, no one asked for some more food from Cook aka. Jason.
After checking out all the different cells we went into Lalo´s room. Wow, this guy has a nicer room then I do. DVD Player, TV, surround sound. He said he was getting a computer in a couple of weeks. These guys get the ful hook up. Some of the prisoners have machine guns! Why do they need machine guns? Once everyone got in and got settled they offered us ¨dessert¨. Lalo had some coke factories in the Bolivian jungle that he runs from the prison. They smuggle coke in and out all the time. Lalo is one of the head king pins in the drug trade of Bolivia and he does it all with a cell phone from the prison. On a good day he´ll make $7,000 USD. These guys don´t mess around. They told us insane stories of the organized killings they committed, the killings in the prison or even the revolution they had a couple weeks before. These guys burnt cells, destroyed the place and held guards hostage to shift the power back to the prisoners. They said two weeks ago guards were every around the prison, but now they are not allowed in the sector where the cells are. That´s part of the reason we were able to do the tour. And Lalo´s connections in the government. The tour only has been legal for two weeks at the time. We were the second legal group to do a tour. Frias told me about his plans to have another even bigger riot where they would do the same and hold some guards hostages. He said to watch for him on the news because he was pretty much insinuating he was going to kill this time. These guys don´t mess around.
So everyone in the group sampled the dessert accept for me and the two Dutch girls. They said it was the best stuff they´ve ever had. It was 95% pure which is supposed to be amazing. We all pretty much chilled and talked about the prison. It was really cool, they said we could ask absolutely anything. My jaw was on the ground from the stories they told us. It was very surreal. The most amazing part is how killing and organized crime is such a normal part of their lives. They had some very interesting perceptions. ¨We are good to good people and bad to bad people. Anybody we kill, they deserve it.¨It was like something out of a movie.
After staying in the prison for about 4 to 5 hours we decided to head back. I was pretty much buzzing the whole time. I couldn´t believe what I saw and heard. That was deifintely the craziest thing I´ve done in South America.
The next day Matt and I walk around town and I grabbed my bus ticket for Copacabana. We checked out some stuff in the market and pretty much chilled most of the day at the couchsurfing place. It was with this American girl that pretty much let anybody surf her place. It was like a couchsurfing hostel. There were 6 couchsurfers there at a time minimum. People just slept everywhere. As you can imagine it wasn´t the cleanest place, understandably. That night we had a big couchsurfing party at her place. It was super cool to hear everyones travel stories. The cool thing about couchsurfers are they are more hardcore travelers. They stick with the locals more and do the more unique things. I´d say they are the best people to get travel advice. Matt and I headed over to Loki hostel´s bar to meet some people to go out with. We headed over to the Salsa bar I was at before with some cool Danish girls. We all had a really good night that lasted till the wee hours of the night. That makes it all that better for sleeping in the bus. I plan all this stuff out.
The next day I barely caught my bus for Copacabana. Lake Titikaka, here I come!
posted by Kean @ 1:08 PM
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