Arriving in La Paz, I was stunned! I felt like back home. As if not 3.5 years would have passed, but only a few weeks. I navigated through the terminal, ignoring the taxi drivers. I went to the same spot on the street I always went to catch a Micro (these kind of vans used for public transport) to get to my home for the next ten days: la casa de la familia de Ximena, a good friend of mine.
Together we went through La Paz and I got to see all the things that have changed: Some new buildings here and there, some new and fancy cafés, a new mall and, most important: some new cable car lines. So we also discovered La Paz from very high up =). In all the time, La Paz hasn’t lost any of its charm, it’s still a very adventurous, partly chaotic, super special and amazing city. I got to visit all my old friends from university, we went out to party in old
and new places and it felt as if I would have never left.
I also visited the colleagues of the time of my internship there, and could even attain a workshop on solar powered irrigation systems, with Reinhold as a trainer. The workshop was organized by GIZ and hold at my old university, I even found myself standing at the speakers desk, giving a short presentation about one of the topics =D.
I could have spent more days or even months in La Paz, but I still had a very big open point for my journey: Brazil. So I took a bus to Santa Cruz, in the eastern low lands of Bolivia, a god 17 hours bus ride. There I spend some days with friends of friends and was getting used to some higher temperatures, my winter boots were packed deep deep down in my backpack. Santa Cruz is very contradictory to La Paz: its way warmer, the streets are wide and traffic is well organized and there are many big parcs (with some of them being full of huge mango trees). Santa Cruz also has a huge botanical garden. For sure the biggest one I have ever seen. It took a good two hours to get from one side to the other!!
From Santa Cruz it took another 10-hour bus ride to get to the boarder of Brazil. I finally did it, I made it into Brazil 🙂
kikilian. 