Even if you were possessed of unlimited creativity and time, you could never draw up a city like this. La Paz is 14,000 feet up, with terracotta houses sprinkled amongst dry shards of mountain, pink and grey. It's like no city I've ever seen - as if we'd landed on the first city erected on Mars.
It was, to me, immediately attractive. I just stared, dumbfounded. If Medellin is shaped like a bowl, then La Paz is a cone. There is not a single flat place in the entire city, the bottom of which is one street wide and angled severely downhill towards the southern suburbs. You are either climbing or descending. If you were to drop a marble on the street, it doubt it would come to a rest for hours.
It's dry and sunny, the range in temperatures is like that in the desert. It might be 40 when you wake up and after an hour of sun, heading towards 80.
Like Medellin, it has a teleferico system, brightly colored gondolas that whisk you about, a thousand feet in the air.
The sun at high altitude is a different - you're either in the bright, blinding light or a dark shade.
From downtown you can always see Illimani, the 21,000 foot volcano that guards the city's eastern flank. To the west, Huayna Potosi is even taller and whiter, almost 23,000 feet high.
It's a stone city, all of the buildings and streets made therefrom. We wandered along the narrow alleys, eating and drinking. One notable drink consisted of water with a small peeled peach, called a Durazno, sitting at the bottom.
Once in a while, near downtown, the alleys opened onto surprising plazas.
We rented a small apartment in the Sopocachi neighborhood on a vertical alley that joined two ends of a street. Ninety-three steps up; made you think twice before you went out for a casual walk.
We planned each outing, making the most of our time, only returning to the climb home when we were nearly exhausted.
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