Benders - a bad idea

So, after another hardly-sleep-filled night, we pulled into El Alto, the upper part of La Paz, just after dawn. I shall divert at this point into another of my occasional geography lessons, as La Paz only makes sense when you understand where it is. The city sits in a high-altitude canyon, where the ground drops away 500m or so in a steep incline from the surrounding altiplano, which is at a dizzying 4,000m above sea level. It was built there after the Spanish discovered gold in the stream running down the canyon, and they chose to build on the slopes rather than the flat for the protection it afforded them from the winds of the altiplano. Nowadays, the main city of La Paz itself, with around three-quarters of a million inhabitants, crowds the walls and floor of the canyon in a dizzying blanket of brick and light, whilst El Alto holds around another 800,000, and is the fastest-growing city in the country (and one of the fastest in the whole of South America). The main link between El Alto and La Paz proper is a toll highway which carves down the side of the cliffs, and it was down this route that we rolled with the sun newly up, and I decided that La Paz has to be one of the most stunningly-situated cities I've ever visited.

After taking a cab from the bus terminal to my hostel, I also started on my steadily increasing respect for La Paz cabbies. We in the UK tend to be quite proud of the competence of black cab drivers in London and their need to pass "the knowledge" test, but La Paz's bizarre topography and pervasive one-way system demands a similar level of knowledge. They're also generally quite garrulous and chatty, especially if they find out you can speak a bit of Spanish - given that I was staying in a very Anglophone hostel, the majority of my Spanish-language interaction in La Paz was probably with cabbies (waiters don't count, ordering a meal doesn't actually use much conversational skills). However, it is quite important to be discerning - the official radio cabs are generally well-looked-after and have a very good chance of getting you where you want to go; the "unofficial" ones (basically just private cars with "taxi" stickers on the side!) can be utter pirates. Or can break down whilst halfway up a seriously steep hill, as one I took did, leading to the driver freewheeling backwards into oncoming traffic whilst trying to bump-start the vehicle. Needless to say, after this I have exclusively taken radio taxis.

So, on to my hostel: the Wild Rover. Yes, it's Irish-owned. Big surprise there. It's dorm-only, not private rooms, and it's famous as one of the "party hostels" of La Paz, so basically full of backpackers who are usually either getting drunk, drunk, hungover, or just arrived from a long bus ride or day trip and in need of a drink. Its bar is "unofficially the highest Irish pub in the world", and does fry-ups, shepherd's pie and the like, with a TV showing all football, rugby etc. It's the kind of place that backpacking snobs who can't stand being around too many other gringos and fantasise lovingly about getting off the gringo trail can't stand, and that gap-year or career-break party animals in search of those with similar instincts love. It's bad for your wallet and your liver, and doesn't help your Spanish very much. But it can be very good fun, especially if you're wanting to run loose for a few days. Needless to say, I spent rather more time and money in there than was really good for me, but I had a pretty good time whilst doing so.

Unfortunately, though, one aspect of its being very popular is that if you arrive early morning off a bus there's a fairly strong chance that your bed won't yet be available, so you end up, as I did, hanging around the hostel's common areas in a state rapidly approaching that of an extra in Shaun of the Dead, in limbo. After fighting with some ridiculously slow e-mail at a place around the corner, eating some of the usual backpacker breakfast in Bolivia of bread and jam, I was comforted by the appearance around lunchtime of Ben and Dee, my friends from travelling in northern Argentina, who had got back from the jungle the previous day. And who, on finding the bar in my hostel, decided that they would have a drink. And would I join them? Oh dear, there goes what little is left of my willpower. I had a beer. Finally my bed became available, and I could put my bags in there, but instead of following my original plan and getting some kip, I decided to carry on drinking with my mates, and the two Yanks, Jesse and Scott, from my bus, who had also miraculously appeared at the Rover (along with an Aussie lass, Nicole, who it turned out was on my glacier trip in Calafate, and Sarah, the English girl who was in my dorm in Salta the night after Ben and Dee left - the Wild Rover is also a worryingly big nexus on the "it's a small world" side of travelling). So Ben, Dee, Scott, Jesse and I took a break from drinking mid-afternoon to go up to one of the miradors (lookouts) over town by taxi, then wandered back down and agreed to meet up for a drink later that evening - I was joining Scott, Jesse, Sarah, Nicole and two other girls they had been travelling with (Karolin, a German, and Kate, an English lass on her gap year) and going for a curry (there is a British-Indian curry house in La Paz, the Star of India...), a trip which Ben and Dee would have joined had they not already been there the previous night!

The curry was a welcome attempt at a flavour of home, although the Naan bread was sadly disappointing, and I was distressed that I found the Madras really quite hot, possibly reflecting a fall in my spice tolerances whist away - Argentina in particular just does not do spicy food. As might be expected, we had a few more beers with the food, I was less-than-surprised to see half my salt flats tour turn up for a meal as well, Ben and Dee popped in after their food to say an emotional farewell (although as Dee is planning on moving to Bristol, there's a fair chance I'll see them again before too long!) and then it was back to the Rover. Where we drank a bit more, and then got into the spirit of the "Fools" fancy dress party. Unfortunately, the better attempts at jester costumes and the like had already gone from the dress-up cupboard, so I ended up wearing a green dress and a santa hat over my other gear. It is a probably a measure of quite how drunk I was getting that I apparently gleefully described myself to one lass as "Maid Marian's Ugly Transvestite Cousin". By 1:30am, I was suitably drunk that I was persuaded (I don't think it took too much effort) to go on to a late bar called Traffic. A place from which I eventually staggered home, in possibly one of the dumber acts of my time travelling, around 4 in the morning. Eeeurgh.