Life in the Bowl Vol. I

The ride down from the La Paz airport by night was one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life. As we rode the twists and turns of the road leading down, stretched out before me was all of La Paz. At 1 am in the morning, the uninhibited view of all of the twinkling lights coming from the makeshift homes clinging to the sides of the steep hills down below gave me the feeling that I was laid out in an open field looking up at the stars in the sky.

For those who are unfamiliar with the layout of La Paz (as I was before arriving) the best image that I could give you would be that of a bowl. Literally. Others have described La Paz as ´the city built within a geologic gash´ in Bolivia’s topography. The reality is that the city sits in the valley of the Choqueyapu River (thanks wikipedia), and for this reason it resembles the aforementioned bowl.

What is most interesting about the city’s geography is how it relates to the socioeconomic order of the city. As a result of the high altitude and thin air (at its highest point it’s about 13500 ft), the lowest points of the city are where you will find the most affluent areas. There is more oxygen here and as a result, living is a lot easier (if you think this an exaggeration, next time you’re in La Paz, try walking uphill for long periods of time, then you’ll get the picture). From these low points the city has grown and developed, to the point where you have some of the city’s poorest in favela type communities that cling to the sides of the La Paz bowl. In La Paz lies a challenge to the popular adage ´shit rolls downhill.´ My cabdriver described the situation as a perpetual struggle of those in the hills to find a way to get further downhill, where the conditions are significantly better.

The second most noticeable aspect of Bolivia’s administrative capital (technically, Sucre is the city’s constitutional capital) are the people. According to the national census, approximately 40% of Bolivia’s population is of indigena descent, though in La Paz it feels like more. This is so noticeable especially as a North American, in which a very small percentage of the U.S. population is of direct Native American descent (all of you who ´claim´ some Cherokee blood do not count). The result of this is that I get a lot of stares and strange looks from people on the street. I imagine the thoughts going through their heads resemble something like:

¨Well, he looks like he could be from Brazil but his Spanish is terrible, he has a thick American accent and he kind of carries himself like a gringo. But...he’s not white.¨

It is also strange being, on the average, taller than most of the men and women out here. I am, strictly speaking, of average height (yes, that goes out to all of you who have tried to deny me my full 6 ft over the years) and so I’m not really used to feeling like I’m towering over others. I guess there´s a first time for everything.

The icing on the cake, referring once again to the general populace of La Paz, is that the culture is very traditional. While you will see people who could fit in, clothing wise, anywhere in the globalized world, you will also see a great number of people (women in particular) in what looks to be traditional Bolivian clothing (patterned knit shawls, for example). This is something, at least in my travels, that I have never seen so widespread, particularly in a country’s capital city. The effect of this difference (as well as several others) is that the city takes on an identity different from any other city I’ve ever known. Large cities are large cities, and with the exception of a few details, there is not a great deal that separates them. However, La Paz´s identity is one that, while in a traditional and economic sense quite modest (to put it gently), is also quite rich in its uniqueness and nonconformity to the major cities of the world.