No Fixed Plans

We had our third boarder crossing of the trip as after 25 days in Peru, we were finally going into Bolivia. While we all like Peru, we all felt like 25 days was an extremely long time, especially given we only had about 8 days in Ecuador. 

We had about 4 hours to the border point, which we were warned when we got there that we weren’t allowed to know our ceo once we got off the bus. We were explained that this was due to the fact that Bolivian boarder control does not like anyone with a Peruvian passport and that G adventures had actually had issues in the past where their Peruvian ceos weren’t allowed through the boarder and they had to send another ceo out to continue the tour. 

Due to these issues, and the fact our ceo didn’t want to tempt any of us to accidentally talk to him,he made sure we all went in front of him and that we had a bunch of strangers in between him and us. the boarder crossing here took a lot less time than our first one (an hour 30 compared to 3 hours and 40 minutes) which  made us all happy. However, due to the fact I was the last in our group, I had a French family behind me with a dad who didn’t understand that not allowing me to have personal space wasn’t going to make the line move faster and I could feel him preying against my backpack the whole time. I think he finally got the idea that maybe he should back up though when I had leaned forward to put my drink bottle in bag and when I stood back upright, I realised he had moved closer and got slightly hit with my backpack. 

Once we got through boarder control, we only had a couple of hours until we got to the bus terminal and then about 20 minutes to the hotel. We all got our rooms and then were given about 20 minutes before we had a briefing about activities in La Paz and  an orientation walk. As this was technically the last day for some of the group, we all had a group dinner at 6pm, where we also said goodbye to our ceo (we won as he said we were genuinely the best group that he had ever had) and then we went out to a pub. We had all wanted to do karaoke so we eventually moved pubs to a place that would allow us to. 5 of us ended up walking ahead as we were tired of waiting for people to finish their drinks and as we were trying to figure out google maps, two locals sitting on their balcony started asking us about what we were chanting in the pub, as they had never heard of it (we were doing the chant to get people to chug their drinks- “we like to drink with (name) because (name) is our friend. And when we drink with (name) s/he gets it down in 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1) and then pointed us in the right direction.

We arrived to the pub, all ordered a drink and while drinking we got given a free shot. It took a bit of convincing by the ceo to let us do karaoke, which eventually got shut down after an Irish guy that had followed us (two people in our tour had befriended them in the first pub) had gotten up onto the pool table to start singing. 

About 8 of us went back to the hotel just before midnight (most due to the fact they had to get up at 5:30am) while the rest stayed out and ended up finding a club. 

The following day I had planned to go on a walking tour with 4 of the group members who were leaving, which one of the guys who was originally meant to do death road biking also joined us on due to the fact he hadn’t slept before the death road biking and I had sent him the link the night prior. 

We all grabbed a late-ish breakfast together in the hotel before going to the starting point of the hotel. The tour lasted about two and a half hours where we got shown inside a church, explained things about the witches market (like why they had real dead llamas hanging from their storefronts and about how they had ceramic frogs for sale that if it had your dna would provide you wealth) before we got shown around the cable car lines. 

We then headed to lunch together in a street where the tour guide had recommended to get food before me and the guy who was meant to do the biking had to head back to the hotel. We had booked to go to a cholita’s wrestling show and were to be picked up at 3pm. The tour had 3 different parts of the show, the first being 5 men wrestling, the second being 3 cholitas wrestling, and the last being where 2 different cholitas were fighting (and the ref ended up siding with one and helping her). 

We had a welcome meeting that night that was set to start at 8pm, which we thought was perfect due to our previous ceo telling us that we would be back from the cholita’s show at 7pm. However, we soon realised that we would be late to the welcome meeting as the show didn’t end until 7pm and then a bunch of people on bus wanted to take photos with them. However, we only missed the first 10 minutes and didn’t really miss much given it was just people introducing themselves and we only had 2 new people joining. 

After the meeting ended, the 2 of us who were late went to grab dinner (which was dirt cheap because we were in Bolivia) and on the way back we realised what the ceo meant about don’t walk alone at night in La Paz as we had one person behind us that we felt was a bit dodgy, however it ended up being fine. 

The next morning was our last day in La Paz as we had an overnight bus at 6pm. 

I had breakfast in the hotel where I was able to properly talk to the two new people as we were the last to have breakfast. Everyone in the group had booked some sort of tour so I ended up walking around the witches market by myself for a bit and had gone back to the frog from the shop we had went into the day before. 

Everyone ended up meeting at the first pub we had went to our first night to watch the World Cup final together before our bus (we were very lucky it finished before we had to leave considering it went into overtime) however we were all upset that Argentina didn’t win. 

We then went back to the bus station for the night bus, which we were all happy to see it was better than our other ones.