Downtown and Down in La Paz

Of all the countries we have visited in South America, Bolivia seems to the the least accesible, or at least that was our experience as we puffed around La Paz today-we have conquered the altitude sickness but this city is still the highest capital city in the world and we notice the shortage of oxygen.

What´s this about? We managed to visit the museums we were interested in-the National Gallery of Art, the Ethnographic and Folk Museum which had brilliant displays of masks, head dresses,capes and other objects made of feathers and a quirky little private museum of musical instruments made from all sorts of bits and pieces, some of which you are allowed to play! We also went into a church and watched a group christening-the street vendors outside were doing a roaring trade in pink and blue rosaries- and back in later, by which time the rosaries had disappeared and confetti and rose petals were being sold from enormous sacks, to watch a wedding. So it is not that we weren´t enjoying ourselves.

However, the combination of the chaotic traffic, especially the taxi-buses whose "conductors" hang out the door and tout for custom as the bus weaves in and out of the traffic, and the steep streets with their cobbled pavements makes walking very hard work. In addition, there seem to be very few tourists here so its hard not to feel conspicuous and out of place-a feeling probably not helped by the fact that the newspaper headlines this morning were proclaiming the decision of the Bolivian President, Evo Morales, "to nationalise the British Company BP." Not least, this is not a coffee, not even a cafe society so we were beginning to feel caffeine withdrawal.

Then we wandered into the Cafe El Consulado and everything suddenly took a turn for the better. The building, we discovered, used to be the Consulate of Panama and is charming. The cafe is a small dining room inside but also, and this is where we ate, a pretty conservatory that looks out onto a beautiful garden with hollyhocks, roses, ferns and-damn it-lemon trees which seem capable of producing lemons, unlike ours in Spain. The food was fantastic- I had a vegetarian plate and a hibiscus juice (yes, the flower-it was delicious). We were also shown the bedrooms which are equally charming and cost 50 US dollars a night, breakfast included. We would choose one of them over our 5 star but utterly charmless Hotel Europa, which is next door, any day, so if you get the chance, do. Then, feeling restored and loved, we checked on the football results (City had won-it always helps!) and went off to buy one of the paintings from an art gallery we had visited earlier in our stay. So all´s well that ends well. Back to Lima tonight for our last two nights.