La Paz

La Paz is the highest populated city in the world! It’s really polluted, built on a mountain and has a local witches market where you can buy Alpaca skeletons and dried frogs. I would love to bring one home (they have put sequins where the eyes are, and coated them in glitter spray!) but I don’t think I could get it through US customs…

Our favorite herbal concoction is the Coca Mate tea which tastes as though it has some Fennel, Green tea and Mint in. The coca leaves reduce altitude sickness, weariness, cold and pain. The Inca love goddess is depicted holding them aloof, and they used to be used in trading (weird having a currency you can actually eat). All the locals chew them (especially bus drivers), and we’ve been getting better and better at spotting those telling hamster cheeks! The British Queen was even given them when she visited South America.

Mate is the Argentinean drink which adds the Fennel flavor to the tea. The locals drink it from clay pots, using straws that have filters at the bottom of them (definitely bringing one for Sarah for drinking loose leaf Green tea! Such a clever idea! ). They carry them around EVERYWHERE, along with thermal flasks of hot water to keep it topped up. Mate had to be banned from public busses, because people would not stop drinking the brew for more than a minute to get their change out!


Yesterday was our first day in La Paz, but Sophia and I needed a day of recovery so didn’t explore much further than the local Moroccan restaurant for our first hummus in a whole month!

We were very sad to leave Sucre, it was a pretty, chilled town and we made lots of friends who accompanied us to the local Karaoke bar, and who we could feed the local PiscoSour to for the first time (reminiscent, I imagine, of watching babies drink something fizzy!).


We will be in La Paz for the next two days...lots of fun things planned!