The Snows of Bolivia

It's rare that I stop my day in America to watch the sunset, and the little fireworks around the setting sun - maybe from my car, on PCH, I'll see it go into the sea somewhere north of Catalina between the oil platforms, but even then I'm moving, driving, going somewhere in particular. But on my trip, for whatever reason, I've seen dozens of sunsets, a few sunrises, and I always seem to have a sense of the sun moving across the sky, the changes in temperature and brightness, the atmospheric things.

Lying in my bus seat, staring out the window in Bolivia, I thought I saw the sky change shape; the horizon seemed to close around the sky, drawing in, shrinking in circumference behind the near mountains, pushing the very top, the crown of darkest blue, higher and deeper. The sky was a high-peaked dome of royal hues, and it fell vertically from a point above me. I don't know why I remember this so distinctly, but for some reason it's stuck in my mind as something important.

Outside of La Paz there is nothing, absolutely nothing, just brown hills and scrub, winding roads and tin-roofed shacks. But then, just after dawn, the bus comes through a small pass onto a wide highway, descending from the mountains, and you see it, La Paz, for the first time: a million people, an entire city, a capital, built into a canyon, the suburbs marching uphill, the snowbound Andes in the background, everything perched. That's the only word for it, a city perched in geography.

I stayed at some dive off the main tourist street, near the Witches' Market. La Paz is - and this is a bit of urban studies wankery - one of the easiest cities in the world to navigate. Not that the street plan makes any sense, and there aren't any street signs really, but if you get lost, just head downhill. The city's main road, it's only main road, was built on top of the river that made the canyon, so everything slopes towards this one avenue. Very easy.

The tourist scene in La Paz is its own foreign culture; neither Bolivian, nor produced Bolivian, nor European or American - just a bunch of young foreigners operating without restrictions, fueled by cocaine, beyond regard for themselves or others. I was fairly terrified.

The stories! Two girls who didn't eat for two days because they couldn't get out of bed. Another who had a hundred dollars left and needed to get back to Sao Paolo. People with sunken eyes and greasy hair, barely communicative, disheveled and destroyed. They came six thousand miles for this?

I met the German girls for drinks, and later, as I left their hostel, it started to rain, and I skipped from stone to stone uphill back to my dive. Halfway there, on the deserted street at three am, the rain stopped - paused really, because it took a moment for the rain to become snow, singular flurries of snow falling on the peaked roofs, 'on the living and the dead.'

Well, I pounded the pavement, rode in combis, uphill and downhill. Somewhere near the stadium I got directions from this little high school girl, probably about 15, who must have just gotten out of school because she had loosened her tie and unbuttoned her blouse. She had tattoos, she wore too much eye makeup in that way teens do, but she was very, very nice. Live the dream Bolivian goth teen girl - just stop cutting yourself.

The last day I was in La Paz, a parade took over the main street. I waited for a couple friends in the main square, eating peanuts. It was my 4th of July, or closest facsimile, to be eating peanuts, wearing a baseball hat and aviators, watching a parade on a sunny afternoon.

I even had a beer.