I am currently in La Paz, the de facto capital city of Bolivia. Let me retrace how I got here! I was booked on a 230am Lloyd Aereo Boliviano flight leaving from Lima to Santa Cruz (which is way east of Bolivia while La Paz is much closer to the West side and Peru) to La Paz that was scheduled to arrive at 845am. The flight was delayed til 445am, and what was supposed to be a two-legged flight, ended up being a four-legged flight that flew from Lima to Santa Cruz to Cochabamba to Sucre then to La Paz!! I arrived at about 2pm in the afternoon. The great thing about doing such a flight is that you get to see a lot of Bolivia all in one morning! I was able to take some aerial photos of the Andean mountain (oops, it´s not the Andes, just some mountain range) with interlacing clouds on the way to Cochabamba. On my camera screen they look awesome, hopefully the dirt on the plane windows wont be too much of a distraction! Also met an Australian girl on the flight, her name is Gabi, and she was coming from Buenos Aires. She got two other friends who are backpacking South America for a year who she is here to join and we have been hanging out since yesterday, which is nice!

I am staying at Hostal Republica, a cute cozy and quite place with two courtyards. I really like it! The altitude here is quite high, 3660 m. Basically La Paz is built on hills and valley, so from the center of the town, you can see lotsa houses on very steep hills surrounding the center part, which is really cool! To acclimatize myself to the altitude, I am drinking lotsa water, walking slowly and taking many doses of the Water essence. My sleep was light and I was getting some headaches in the night time, but today is good so far. Yesterday I had dinner with the girls at this place called Dumbo (yes, the Dumbo the elephant) where we had lotsa fried food and chocolate sundae. Today we strolled at the Witches´ market, which is a major tourist attraction. The guidebook makes it sound all spooky and intriguing, but it´s merely a lil´alley with lotsa souvenir shops, and the only relatively spooky thing they got selling there is the llama fetuses, which are supposed to used as gifts to Mother Earth for burial or something. I bought some alpaca clothings which are realy cheaper, most things for less 50 hongkie. Btw, the Boliviano has the same exchange rate to the dollar as Hongkie..

Anyway, the altitude is making me sleepy and my eyes feel really dry at the moment. Later on, I will try to post some of my photographs on the blog as well. But I probably will wait til´I have enough pix to burn on a CD, which is what everyone does here to clear room for their memory cards. This keyboard is horrible. will write again later. Am in La Paz until Sunday.

Photo: Aerial shot on flight from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, Cordillera Real de Bolivia