La Paz

I’ve been hanging out in La Paz, Bolivia for like 5 days now I think. It’s been really nice. Biking into town was a little stressful. I asked a few people, which way to go, and they all pointed towards a fairly busy freeway. As I flew downhill I noticed several “no biking” signs, but no police stopped me, and eventually I made it into the city. It’s funny, because there is no way I would ever bike along a freeway like that in the US, but when bike touring, you don’t really have much of a choice.
It also is a little disorienting to enter into such a large city after spending so much time in the middle of nowhere. the two "hotels" i stayed in before la paz had no running water. I decided to stay at this hostel called the Adventure Brew Hostel. It’s a giant backpacker hostel, where they have a micro brewery on the fourth floor, and you get a complementary beer every night in the hostel bar and an all you can eat pancake breakfast in the morning.
My fist night there, I was talking to this British guy john, and we went up to the bar to meet up with a friend of his. It ended up that his friend was this American girl named Ingrid, who is the daughter of a friend of a friend of my parents. confusing, no? My parent’s friend Cathy had sent us both emails to see if we could meet up, but I was in Peru (I think) and she was in Ecuador so we never met. What are the odds of us both ending up at the same hostel in Bolivia?

While out to dinner with british john and ingrid, i ran into the irish couple, John and Po, who i'd hung out with at lake titicaca. the next day british john, and irish john and po and i all went to this british pub to watch the irish - french rugby match at 11:00am. we ordered a "proper british fry up" for breakfast, which included deep fried toast, baked beens, stewed tomatoes, fried eggs, and bacon. and then since it was a rugby match we all got beer as well.
The rugby match was insane. i've never seen ruby before, and it is a brutal, brutal sport. english john assured me that rugby was a "gentleman's sport" despite the violence. everyone in the pub was either irish or british, and peole were just going crazy for the game. whenever the irish would score, the whole bar would errupt in applause, with people yelling, "yeah! that's right mates!" it was pretty awesome. po said that this was about a quarter of the volume of an irish pub during a rugby match.
this is a picture of a box of alpaca fetuses. La Paz has a witch doctor market. it's pretty creepy. i'm not sure what the witch doctors do with the alpaca fetuses, but maybe it's best not to know. there are stalls full of herbs, and trinkets and fake US dollar bills. i've seen alters with these things on them, but never before the alpaca fetuses.

Yesterday Po, john and i rode mountain bikes down the "most dangerous rode." the tour company took all these photos of us and burned me a cd, but i can't get the cd player to open on this computer. so, if you want to see what it looks like check out this site http://www.hotelscostarica.net/Stremnaya/carretera-mas-peligrosa/. the rode is safer now because they built a new one that is paved. the only people who use the most dangerous rode are tourists on mountain biking expeditions. it was a really beatiful ride. you start off high above la paz in the altiplano, and then plummet down this dirt and gravel rode into the amazon basin. it was freezing cold in the morning, and boiling hot in the afternoon.
tomorrow i am traveling back to peru via bus and airplane to meet up with my friends for a 10 day vacation from my cycling trip. we are going to cuzco and machu pechu, and then i'm not sure what else. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie