Monday, June 14: Breakfast with Stars

Breakfast with Stars
I’m up around 7AM, compliments of jetlag. Blandine’s been awake for hours, and confides that she’s dealing with a massive headache since yesterday. My head is hurting a tiny bit as well, so today we’ll take it veeery slow. The suggested three days to acclimatise to the altitude doesn’t sound silly anymore.
I bring a bread roll, a banana and a cup of maté de coca (suggested drink against altitude disease)  up to our room for my sick little puppy, and find myself breathing heavily from going up just one flight of stairs. It’s better than yesterday already, when I was breathing faster  just from grabbing something out of my backpack on the other side of the room. When I catch my breath, I head back to the breakfast room with my camera. Two Brazilian couples are having breakfast, but my camera lens is more interested in the life-sized cardboard replicas of Chewbaka, Han Solo and Yoda that decorate the La Paz skyline. What are they doing here? My guess is that something must have gotten seriously lost in translation when a hotel guest asked for the “Breakfast of the Stars”?  The Brazilians have left the breakfast room by now, so Han Solo and Leia make for great surreal company. After a few snaps of them, I head up to the room again to see my own intergalactic princess again and agree to take look around the neighbourhood while she tries to recover from her headache a bit more.

Easy does it
Back in Sol y Luna I catch up on email with Japan-Cameroon on in the background. When I check up on my sweetheart in the early afternoon, Blandine feels good enough to look around town a bit.

La Paz is laid out like a half-pipe with El Prado, the central boulevard, at the very bottom. Eva Palace is right next to El Prado, so either way we go when we leave the hotel, we must climb. I suggest to slooowly make our way to nearby café Pepe for lunch, with a full stomach we’ll be able to better face sightseeing in this hilly town. It’s only two blocks away from the hotel, but after the first block we’re both already breathing heavily. The stroll to café Pepe is worth it: this tiny all-day breakfast café is originally decorated with 4 gorgeous wooden tables and serves superb food. We settle for the table decorated with a layer of shiny coffee beans under the top glass. Fresh coffee, fresh orange juice and a grilled ham and cheese roll bring me back to my senses. When we’re almost done, I start a conversation with two French girls at the table next to us. They are at the end of their trip and give us loads of info about their tour on the salt plains.

The Italy-Paraguay game flashes up on screen, but we can’t afford to watch it if we want to see a bit of La Paz before nightfall, so we take advantage of the warm afternoon sun to walk around the nearby witches market, where llama foetuses hang out for sale. They bring good luck, except to the llama itself, obviously. After a few more sights, we walk down El Prado, to Sopocachi, the posh area in town and decide to dine in “La Comédie”, an upscale French restaurant that our friends Rob and Cath had recommended. The llama steak is cooked to perfection, the 3-pepper sauce a wonderful compliment. Blandine’s headache has completely gone by now, so a glass of wine is within reach, but neither of us wants to push our luck, so we stick with water. After dinner we ask the waiter to ring us a cab and agree between ourselves to discuss the fare price before we get in.






It’s not fare!
A word about taxi fares: as a tourist from a rich country, taking a cab costs peanuts here. Our Footprint guidebook estimates the fare for short trips in a normal taxi between USD 0.85 and USD 1.10, pretty much the price of a bag of peanuts. As opposed to the fixed-route collective taxis, who charge half a bag of peanuts. Prices go up a bit at night, but like everywhere else in the world, knowing the average cab fare really helps a lot in discovering that you’ve been scammed.

As we step outside the restaurant, a chilly wind blows through our shirts, so we hop into the warmth of the parked vehicle, exactly the opposite from the agreed upon strategy. The minute I sit down I ask the guy how much it will be. He mumbles something under his moustache. So I ask again. He says he needs to call the dispatch centre to get a quote. But he doesn’t make the call. “Ok, quanto vale este taxi hasta Eva Palace Hotel!” “Senor, part of the road is broken up, I’ll have to drop you at the top of the road if you don’t mind.” “Sure, but how much is it??” We’re over half way at this point. “Erhm, 10 Bolivian pesos.” Phew, that’ll work for us. 7 Bolivian pesos buys you a US dollar, so we’re still in peanut range and, more importantly, we don’t feel scammed. I sink a bit more into the seat back now, and don’t mind the guy chatting with his mom over the mobile phone. It’s quite disarming really: “Yes mami, I picked up the mail for you today…….No mami, there wasn’t anything important amongst them….Yes mami, I’ll stop by tomorrow and drop the stack of letters off…. Yes mami, I can stay for dinner.”

We get out of the cab at the top of Sagárnaga, our street, pay the cab driver (no tip, obviously), walk back to the hotel and call it a night.