We´re Not Ones For Busting Through Walls

From Copacabana we take the bus and a ferry ride over Lake Titicaca to put us back on the road to La Paz.

Rather, we go on the ferry, our bus goes on a barge. This is normal, but disconcerting.

Our bus is somewhere back there in the distance...

Another Bolivian war hero. And some llamas.

A few miles out of La Paz and the road changes from scattered strands of shacks and cottages to a more steady stream of half-built shops, hotels, garages and assorted dwellings.

The High Street

Des res

It's a red-brick Deadwood, enough work for a million bricklayers for a thousand years.They love a brick wall - any spare land, get building - a house, a wall, four walls with nothing inside (a compound?), a pile of bricks neatly arranged. If you´re lucky, some electioneering squad will come and graffiti their candidate´s name all over your lovely work, and they are everywhere in South America!

Maybe finish the pavement at some stage?

When the election starts and ends, we still don´t know. It just feels like they are always a step away from the polling booth.

Where´s McDonald´s when you want one !?

People sit around in the dirt, dodge between the relentless stream of city-bound traffic, sell food along the murky canals behind the streets and on waste ground.

They seem quite happy, mind. There's a Pepsi plant and a Coca-Cola factory sitting colourfully shoulder-to-shoulder next to a petroleum company premises. Perhaps there's plenty of work and this is a boom town?

Descending into the city via the motorway, our bus hits Saturday rush hour, a vortex of honking traffic, winding slowly into the tight streets at its centre.

Now there's more of everything - people, buildings, noise, dogs, honking horns, grime. It's a little more claustrophobic, even by South American standards.

From the bus station, the taxi driver takes us on a pricey (£1.40!) two minute loop to our hotel and, we think, takes us for a ride.

So, first impressions of La Paz aren't great . Sit it out for a couple of days, then get out to Uyuni and the wide-open salt flats asafp...