Justine and Dylan’s Travel Blog

As an aside, for the enjoyment (or not)  for those who haven´t been to not-so civilised places like La Paz (or Rome or the Arc du Triomphe in Paris), I thought I´d throw in a few traffic rules we learned yesterday on our way through La Paz as passengers in one of the local taxi´s… (although I imagine these will be very familiar to anyone who´s been to South America, Africa, Asia or Bendigo)

• Adhering to red lights is optional
• If someone is tooting their horn at you, you´re ok: at that stage you know you´ve been seen (and will probably not be mowed down)
• Lines on roads to indicate lanes are a waste of paint. Besides, you can fit more lanes onto a slab of concrete if lanes are not marked.
• There is always an invisible third lane in the middle of the road. The direction of this lane varies depending on the speed and size of oncoming traffic
• A gap is a gap. A gap is always worth going for. Lives are expendable when a gap has been sighted
• Taxi drivers are actually part-time off-road rally drivers. This becomes apparent when not on sealed roads.
• There are no bonus points for hitting old ladies, dogs, people with boxes of stuff, etc. as these are all to easy to hit: for some reason they seem to throw themselves (or perhaps they are thrown?) in front of oncoming traffic every few metres
• You don´t need a power nap when tired: a near miss accident every few minutes is guaranteed to keep the adrenaline pumping all day…

More interestingly, everyone seems to go by the same rules and survives. I´d just be intrigued to find out how driving lessons are conducted…

Fortunately the second day was a little more productive than our first day in La Paz (although not particularly surprising). We did a walk from Tuni (about two hours outside of La Paz) to the Condoriri base camp at 4700m, through stunning scenery. You can see why people keep coming back for the many treks in the Bolivian mountains.

Condoriri is one of the mountains in the Cordillera Real and like most is a rather technical climb if you want to get to the top. The walk to base camp, although reasonably tough (17kms, between 4300m and 4700m), fortunately only involves very gentle slopes (so is very easy on the knees, unlike the Inca Trail!).

Again, we seemed to be very lucky with the weather. The sun was out all day and when we set out the area was covered in a thin layer of snow from the previous night. By the time we had lunch though, the snow was gone and had transformed the landscape into a green version of the one we walked through in the morning. Very cool.

Again, some pictures to follow when I get to a (much faster) computer with USB and some sort of image editing (resize) software (other than MS Paint in Spanish… que??).