La Paz

omigodomigodomigodomigod it's fab!!!!!!

You land at 4100m, the plane has to almost go up to land! And the air is so rarefied that the lights twinkle and all the white lights look green which makes the city look amazing. Then you come down from the alto to La Paz city at 3600m, and we have come down even further (3200m) to the hotel, Casa Grande, which is superb. I have a suite and wait till you see the photos of it, it's probably one of the best places I have stayed in the last few months! Bearing in mind Ithis is the third 5 star hotel I have been in recently, I must stop complaining at how crap working in broadband is!! Even the loo roll is folded with a little fan of paper, and there are mega chocs on the table, but of course I don't eat chocolate so maybe I'll nick them and see how they travel!

I've just read some bits in Footprint Bolivia which I didn't know. Like the road we are going on tomorrow is considered the most dangerous road in the world. Like I wasn't bricking it anyway! Here's a line from the book, "Bolivia is weird....it's the kind of place where you start taking the strangest things for granted. Like sitting next to an alligator on the bus, sharing a taxi with a pile of llama foetuses, or waiting behind a group of piglets at the check-ion desk." So my trip so far has been tame!!

The best bit about La Paz is that it has International Harvesters. For those of you who don't know, that's a Yankee school bus and I have wanted one for as long as I can remember to live in. So, Bolivia is now perfect for me!

There is a DLink access point in every room and ADSL (I think it might even be real ADSL ie with some bandwidth to it as they call everything ADSL here even if it's 64k down!) so I'm prob going to borrow a free laptop from reception and post some stuff tonight and make the most of this book and some time to surf.....

Quick bit of culture. Butch Cassidy and Sundance came here to die in a tiny village in the altiplano called San Vicente. Also, Che came here to start a revolution and was executed in a miserable hamlet in the middle of nowhere called La Higuera. And for some British stuff - a british diplomat caused a crisis in La Pazjust over a century ago when he slagged off the local drink, chicha when it was served to him by the incumbent dictator. As punishment, he was forced to drink a barrel of chocolate and paraded naked around La Paz strapped to a donkey. Queen Victoria was not overly impressed at this treatment of one of her diplomats, so she demanded a map of South America, drew a great big cross through Bolivia and declared, "Bolivia doesn't exist". Luckily, things seem to have improved for us brits!

Anyway, off to make the most of this funky accommodation.

Cheers for the scarecrow parade pic Chris, any more whilst I'm on this fat pipe? Try hello for video, it's ace for sharing photos and maybe it'll work for your videos too. Otherwise what about Bittorrent for sharing them? It's pretty easy to convert them to torrents and then everyone can see them.