Monday, September 12, 2005
...What noise does a Llama make ?
...so, we´ve been in La Paz for 3 days now. We didn´t do much at the start due to illness & altitude, but we´re both feeling much better now. Yesterday we visited a bunch of museums, the best being the musical instruments museum and the Coca museum. At the music museum, you could play everything from percussion instruments made from armadillo to a yamaha organ...great fun. Today, we visited the Valle de La Luna which is a crazy
landscape of mud pillars and canyons. We went in a micro which is a colourful, bus which will stop anywhere. It´s amazing they make it up the hills at all. The one we went in had a gear stick with a skull on the top covered in white fur...nice.But the best thing to do here is just wandering through the streets looking at the colourful women in their traditional dress & bowler hats, the craft markets and the witches market. Here they sell Llama foetus´s which are
buried in the cornerstone of a new business or house to provide prosperity apparently. If you´re rich though, you´re expected to sacrifice the real thing. This place is really poor. We went downtown last night (the rich bit), and saw a number of people going through garbage bins, and a couple working together to break wood of small trees lining a road. The man climbed the tree and snapped off twigs then threw them down to the woman to collect. There are hardly any trees here - the valley has been totally deforested in the last 70 years. La Paz has a crazy layout - set in a canyon, the poorest area is El Alto (the 
plateau above the city), the richest is right down the valley where it´s warmer, and the houses cover the canyon walls....and what noise does a Llama make ? We´ll let you know in a few days, as we´re going trekking to Isla del Sol tomorrow.
# posted by Pete @ 12:12 PM 
