Day 2: La Paz

After a surprisingly good night's sleep on the plane, we arrived at the La Paz airport at 5:20.  Immediately we noticed the amazing mountain ranges all around us, reminding you of how high of an altitude you really were.

 Balancing out the awesome new landscape around us, was the equally less enjoyable temperature.  Since Bolivia is in the southern hemisphere, it was winter and therefore a little colder that ideal.  Nevertheless, we wrapped up in our jackets and pressed on.

After meeting up with our Bolivian contact Afnon, we went to his house for a few hours of R&R before venturing out into La Paz with our tour guide Hugo.

Hugo basically took us wherever we wanted to go, but being the Americans we were, we ended up feeding pigeons for a while, which was actually pretty amazing, even though it made you feel a little dirty.

Dirty was kind of a theme of the Bolivian cities, the streets themselves were clean but everything just had a dirty feel to it.  Whether I wanted to or not, my mind was subconsciously comparing everything to what I was used to back home, which really helped me appreciate the things that we saw and did.  After we walked through the street markets, tried to find food to eat that wouldn't make us sick, and looked at the occasional dried llamas for sale, we headed back to Afnon's for some supper before we boarded a very nice two decker bus that would drive us for 10 hours to Potosi.  A barrage of crying babies and cell phone alarms serenaded us until I was finally able to fall asleep.  When we finally got to Potosi, the man was nice enough to finally turn his cell phone alarm off, what a guy.  Oh and Will threw up.