Self-guided La Paz City Walking Tour

Sunday morning we headed to Plaza Murillo to meet for one of the many advertised city walking tours that apparently was apparently still running. We headed here with our new friend from the States, Andrew (Hi Andrew). Upon waiting for 30 minutes past the walking tour’s starting time we decided it was cancelled, or just plain didn’t exist.

As we were new to La Paz and still wanted to explore and understand the city we decided that we would do our own walking tour.

From Plaza Murillo we checked out the various government buildings surrounding the plaza and then headed into the art museum, that was currently under construction, and resultantly had free entry.

After that we headed to a church nearby, where we bought some carne salteñas and headed up to the Yungas Markets. The Yungas markets is a huge local fruit, meat and vegetable market, and everything iss ridiculously cheap. 

At the markets we bought some apples, bananas and a bag of juice. Yes, a bag of juice. 

From the produce markets we headed towards the large central park, located in the heart of the city. And to our luck there was a huge market on. 

The market had stalls selling everything from chocolate covered strawberries and fairy floss, to fresh juices and hamburgers, to offerings to the Pacha mama, and even side show alley games. There was everything.

After spending an hour or so in the huge markets we headed to San Pedro Plaza, home of San Pedro prison, made infamous by Rusty Young’s book, Marching Powder. After lurking around for a little bit we headed onwards to the witches market. 

At the witches market you can buy everything from coca leaf sweets, to relationship, travel and friendship talismans, to horny goat weed (or bulls penis powder) and finally to llama foetuses. Yes, llama foetuses. And I’m not talking a tiny foetus, or something in a jar, I’m talking some that was potentially within a week of full term and has been miscarried. It was definitely different. 

The llama foetuses are bought and placed under the foundations of a new home or building as an offer to Pacha Mama (mother earth) for good luck and safety of it’s occupants. The size of the llama foetus needed depends on the size of the structure. You can get a tiny llama foetus (from very early on in pregnancy) for a small home and a large llama foetus (like in the picture below) for a large multi story complex. 

From the markets we wandered onwards, Sammy bought a beanie, I bought a diary and Sean bought a brownie. We reached our hostel exhausted from the days self guided tour.

The next few days were spent doing english lessons with Pico Verde, these were great and helped us to progress a little bit more with our spanish.

Tomorrow we’re headed to Rurrenabaque to visit the Pampas and hopefully spot some amazing animals.

We’ll report back on how it all goes.

Adios!