Altitude and Ritual
Apparently I spoke (or wrote) too soon yesterday when I said that the altitude wasn´t affecting me much. By dusk, my head was pounding and my feet and hands were really swollen, my fingers looked like sausages.
I spent the afternoon checking out the markets, first the Mercado Negro, which is a huge outdoorish flea market. I didn´t see all of it, but I did find its shoe district, its fried food district, the hammock district...after that I tried to find the Witches Market, but got really lost. Only a quarter of the streets here have signs, so I got rather confused and walked a lot. Walking can be tough up mountain grade streets, and I had to stop occasionally to catch my breath. Almost 14,000 feet above sea level means some pretty thin air.
Eventually I ended up at San Pedro Prison, which I had heard a lot about from other people and the book Marching Powder. It´s a prison where you can buy better cells the more money you have. It has restaurants, and even entire families live there. They used to give tours of it, but I heard they´ve stopped. I looked inside, and saw chaos.
After getting my bearings at the prison I managed to find my way to the Witches Market, by far the most (and kind of only) touristy area of La Paz. It´s full of shops where you can buy potions, amulets, dead llama fetuses, stuff like that. I wasn´t planning on getting anything, but I ended up in a dark shop with a small stone carving in my hand that I liked. The woman told me it was for amor, and I bought it for 5 Bolivian pesos, about 75 cents.
After that I realized I hadn´t eaten all day, so I found a restaurant with a nice balcony and had a cafe con leche, a bowl of soup, and bread. Total was 10 pesos, or about a dollar 25. Bolivia is by far the cheapest country I have been to in South America.
I was feeling the affects of the altitude, so I lay down in my splurge of a private room for an hour or so before dinner. For dinner I chose the easiest option of attending the hostel´s BBQ, pretty good chorizo and homebrewed beer. The view was spectacular from the cabina where we ate, staring across the valley at the other side of the mountain.
The best part of dinner though, had to do with the fact that it was once of Bolivia´s biggest holidays, Alasitas. Basically, people buy miniature versions of what they wish for in the upcoming year, usually money, houses, etc, and have them blessed. So after dinner I was given a small packet with a miniature Bolivian passport, an American visa, Euros, Dollars (all of it fake of course), and other things. Then a holy man formed a circle and performed a ceremony blessing the miniature bundles, and blessing each person individually. It was pretty cool to get to experience a Bolivian ritual, even if it was interrupted by annoying drunk backpackers laughing. I shushed them periodically until they went away.
Anyway, that was a pretty cool part of last night. Today I am going to the Valley of the Moon, not sure if I will have time for Lake Titicaca, which I really want to see. The tour I am taking begins tonight, I think tomorrow we go to the Uyuni salt flats. I do wish now that I had just done everything on my own instead of signing up for a tour, but I know it´ll probably be safer and I have already paid for it, so it´s fine.