Munay (Love & Beauty): Stories of Life in Peru: Bolivia!: La Paz and Death Road Bike Ride

During the first week of December I took a trip to Bolivia with a group of 4 other Peace Corps friends of mine (all ladies!). We had an AMAZING trip and totally loved Bolivia. Some of the highlights included exploring the beautiful city of La Paz, doing a bike ride down the ¨death road¨, and taking a 3 day tour of the salt flats.

I have literally been uploading photos for the past 1 hour and 20 minutes and the internet is SO slow and it also isn`t cheap to use internet in the middle of no-where-land! I have given up hope of uploading the rest of the photos that I was planning on posting so for now I will just be posting photos of La Paz and the bike ride down the death road. In a few days I will try to upload the photos of the beautiful Salt Flats.

La Paz was an incredible city and I totally fell in love with it right away. I even felt jealous that Bolivia gets to have such an awesome capital city while Peru is stuck with Lima! Sitting at around 3,600 meters, La Paz is the highest capital city in the world and it is surrounded by beautiful snow capped mountains with just stunning views from all points of the city! The city has a population of around 3 million and while parts of the city are very unorganized and chaotic, other parts are just lovely. The more touristy parts of the city are very colonial and classy. I would love to return to La Paz and just spend a few weeks there!

To arrive to Bolivia from where I live I had to take the following means of transportation:

-8 hour bus from my site to Lima

-An hour long plane ride from Lima to Arequipa (thank gosh we found a good offer on plane tickets and were able to fly!)

-8 hour bus ride from Arequipa to Desaguadero, the border town between Peru and Bolivia

-2 hour mini bu

Border crossing!!

Driving into La Paz

The artisans markets in La Paz were awesome!

The Bolivian White House

A beautiful super colorful street

I just LOVED the Bolivan traditional dress

With our sweet Colombian friend that we met on the trip

The bike ride down the "death road" was a 4-5 hour bike ride through a very curvey, bumpy road. It started on a paved road and about 1/4 of the way through it cuts off to the "old" part of the road that is all paved. Riding down an unpaved, very bumpy dirt road on cheap bikes (because of our low Peace Corps Budget we could afford to rent the cheapest bikes!) is a bit hard on the body. So by the end of the bike ride we were all kind of in pain. But the views were stunning and it was totally worth it. The bike ride started in the high mountains at 4,800 meters and ends in the jungle at around 2,000 meters.