Saturday, August 11th, 2018

We scurried from desk to desk, clerk to clerk, trying to figure out a way to make it to La Paz on Saturday morning. United was not helpful. At all. Their partner airline, Latem, was less helpful. We found a flight on Peru Airlines from Lima to Cuzco to La Paz, departing at 350AM and arriving in La Paz at 730AM, so we went to the Peruvian Air desk to buy tickets. Except their ticket counter was closed until 3AM. Except the cross woman running the counter insisted it would cost us $2000US to get tickets on those flights. We showed her the price online, which was closer to $500US for everything; she said she couldn’t help us because those were online-only prices.

So, we stood in the Lima airport at 3AM, frantically trying to buy tickets on my phone, trying to figure out which credit cards would work with the bad purchasing system. Finally, success! Though Joy had to buy tickets for the Lima->Cuzco flight and I had to buy the tickets for the Cuzco-La Paz leg.

There was another traveler in the same boat as us, a professional-looking Indian from San Francisco who wanted to see the Salt Flats in Bolivia. He was taking a long weekend to quickly knock some places off his bucket list. We ended up sharing a row on the plane from Lima to Cuzco and waved at one another on the flight to La Paz, then he disappeared into the crowd at the luggage belt in La Paz, comrades in travel for a short while.

We started taking Diamox for altitude sickness in Lima, but it was too late. We should’ve started a day before we left Austin. The combination of no sleep and fast shift from sea level to the extremely high altitude at Cuzco (and later higher in La Paz) made us sluggish, slow, and out of breath for even the simplest actions. Cuzco was beautiful though and made us excited to spend more time there later in our trip.

We made another friend in Cuzco, a short fat mustachioed man in Nepalese pants in front of us at the check-in counter for the flight from Cuzco to La Paz. His luggage was far too heavy and he argued with the clerks about paying extra. At one point, he looked back at me and said, “I can’t communicate with these people. Impossible.” I wasn’t willing or able to give him any validation and just shrugged.

Later, waiting for the plane, he insisted, “you gotta see the Salt Flats man! They’re insane! Fuck everything else!” I looked it up and the salt flats were over 200 miles from La Paz- not doable on this trip.

And so we flew out of Cuzco, toward our original destination: La Paz. The flight to La Paz was beautiful; we had great views of the Andes, terrace farms, and Lake Titicaca. It’s amazing to me just how much the terrain has been changed by human hands over the centuries and millennia. Every hill and mountain, no matter how tall or precarious, has been terraced. There are houses in impossible places, on top of craggy outcroppings, or at the end of long serpentine roads that must take hours to traverse by car, much longer by foot. The people live and in many ways thrive in a place where I can barely catch my breath.

And so we landed in La Paz, a vertical city, building on building on steep mountainsides, starting from the airport at the top in El Alto and descending into the Centro below, where our hotel and tour group awaited. We had a very helpful taxi driver who gave us lots of background on the city as we made out descent, and allowed a stop for Joy to take pictures of the city vistas.

La Paz reminded me of the border towns I’ve visited in Mexico; vibrant, but dirty and a few decades of good economic development separated from cities in the United States or Europe.

We found out we DIDN’T have to be in La Paz until the 12th! Joy planned better than she thought and got us an extra night in La Paz in case we ran into travel problems just like the ones that we did run into. So we had showers and a nap and woke up refreshed but still reeling from altitude sickness. Joy went out to explore and I napped some more, which I think was a huge help. I started recovering from the sickness faster than Joy.

We met our tour group: we, the only the Americans, a Canadian, three Brits, 2 eastern Europeans, and the rest German-speaking folk from Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. We also met our tour guide, Enrique (or KiKe as his friends call him, pronounce Key-Cay). Next stop, Puno- and Lake Titicaca.

Next: Road to Puno