La Paz was never on my short list of vacation destinations. For this trip, it made sense. I did a lot less research on this city than I should have. The altitude and pollution impacted me more than I thought they would. I struggled with catching my breath after walking just a few hundred meters. For a good portion of my time in La Paz I just wanted to leave. That being said, I wasn’t a complete sad sack the whole time. For the little bit of time that we weren’t sick, we did enjoy ourselves.

After we checked into our hotel, we wandered around and visited the Iglesia de San Francisco and walked over to the Plaza Murillo which is home to the Presidential Palace. The Plaza was surprisingly busy with so many people playing with and feeding the pigeons.

Plaza Murillo full of families feeding the pigeons and enjoying the sun.

We were hungry but found most places were closed on Sunday. We did stumble across a little cafe just a few blocks from our hotel which was owned and operated by a well traveled Bolivian man. He had even worked in world glass restaurants in the US with chefs like Grant Achatz of Alinea and Next fame.

The tile work in the cafe was stunning.

A simple cubano sandwich with chips and a beer was a wonderful way to relax.

This small coffee shop had a great Cuban sandwich and reasonably priced beers, and was housed in a beautiful building. We spent a couple hours chatting with the owner – great conversations about travel, food, politics and corruption (both US and other countries). After our time here, I was very excited to see other parts of La Paz and meet other Bolivians.

The next day Mike was feeling under the weather, so we took it slow and joined a cable car tour. La Paz is built in the bowl, so public transit can be a bit difficult – you can’t really build subways like you would in a flatter city, or even a hilly city, the logistics are reversed. The buses must traverse very steep inclines with limited oxygen too. The city decided to build an aerial cable car system, called Mi Teleférico, that connects La Paz with El Alto and various points in between. We stumbled across this tour company as we were checking out Calle Jaen.

Calle Jaen is worth a visit as it is a beautiful old cobblestone Street surrounded by brightly colored buildings. These buildings are home to museums, art galleries and a tour shop.

Jaen Street (Calle Jaén) in La Paz is a charming little street full of colorful buildings housing small shops, museums and tour offices.

The tour we took was lead by a woman who was of Spanish decent, but her family had been in La Paz for hundreds of years. She studied in the US and her English was perfect. Our tour had four other people on it, all members of the same family.

The tour connected all three cable car lines, but also required us to take the small local mini buses as well. The views were amazing and our guide was quite knowledgeable about current political events as well as the long and storied history of Bolivia.

A view from our Cable Car Tour of La Paz.

The buildings scaling the hills of La Paz leading up to El Alto.

Mountains in the distance over La Paz.

One story that was brought up many times as we wandered through Bolivia was the unfortunate fact that Bolivia is now a land locked country. Bolivia use to have a coastline, but lost it in the late 1800s in a war with both Chile and Peru. The Bolivian government was pushing international courts to return the captured land back to them. The Bolivians that we talked to were all confident that their request filed in International Court would be successful. The Peruvians we spoke with were equally confident that Bolivia would NOT be successful.

You will see we didn’t do a lot while in La Paz, we were sidelined by the altitude. We knew we needed to be out and active when we were feeling up to it, so we tried to hit it hard when we could. Our stomachs were in awful shape. We spent so much time just in our hotel.

Is La Paz on your short list? What would you recommend to others who plan on visiting? Biking the World’s Deadliest Road is high on my recommendation list, plus dining at Gustu (read about that soon). What did we miss out on?