As with Quito previously, the great appeal of La Paz (which is not the actual capital of Bolivia - that title belongs to the delightful colonial town of Sucre) lies in its improbable location clinging to several hills at roughly 4000m above sea level. Therefore wandering through the city in blanket cloud cover and incessant rain robs it off its appeal somewhat.
That said, we had a good day walking around the city in the rain, buying as much useful stuff as we could to take advantage of the rock-bottom Bolivian prices, and strolling through the endless covered street markets, where you can buy literally everything possible. I believe that the lack of supermarkets in La Paz is because most of its residents buy everything they could ever need from those huge street markets.
On that same day we also booked a mountain bike trip on the death road - a road that took an hour to drive in a car and which saw an estimate 9,000 deaths from its opening in the 1930s until it was eventually closed to traffic around ten years ago. That's not a typo either. So it was with a certain trepidation that we signed our lives away (the company was NOT responsible for our deaths in any circumstances) and paid actual money for the pleasure of riding on this kamikaze stretch of road.
In the end our company Vertigo Biking were excellent and provided us with very good brakes that worked (very important!), so we felt fairly safe. The first part saw us ride along a long high altitude asphalt road in familiarly cold wet and cloudy conditions, but once we reached the death road checkpoint and signed our lives away again, things started looking up as we started going down (the whole way was downhill).
The first fifteen minutes or so of the death road were fairly scary, as the crumbly road and the sheer drop of up to 600m or so made you only too aware of your proximity to death. But, personally speaking, after those fifteen minutes you just forget all that and enjoy the ride, keeping away from the edge of course. The road descends from 4650m to 1200m in the space of 43 miles, so despite the danger and rockiness you can just let go off the brakes and enjoy yourself as you swing around racing corners and through waterfalls whilst enjoying stunning rainforest scenery. The last person to die was taking a selfie on the road and fell off a cliff so I guess as long as you pay attention more than him you'll be OK.
That evening we took a taxi up to a viewpoint above the city and sat with a bag of chips shivering up there amongst kissing teenagers. The city's architecture is somewhat outdated, but the sight of the lights climbing up those improbably steep hills was something to behold and made us somewhat sad that we hadn't been able to give La Paz more of a chance.
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