Bolivia
La Paz • Lake Titicaca
May 2019 • When you're coming from the airport, there's a point where the taxi turns a corner in El Alto and begins a serpentine descent into a broad canyon studded with red-brick buildings—and the only suitable reaction is WOW. My driver laughed and said: "Bienvenidos à La Paz." A bowl-shaped city doesn't have many hiding places; pretty much everything can be seen from any angle. And that's the allure of La Paz's incredible Mi Teleférico system. Designed and engineered by a Swiss company, subsidized and promoted by the socialist regime of President Evo Morales, the teleférico is an extensive network of gondola lines that shuttles residents along 30 km of cable for less than a dollar per ride. Erdem and I spent an entire afternoon riding every tentacle of this octopus, which made La Paz feel more like a discount Disneyland than a chaotic city of 2.7 million. Next morning we met Claudia at the bus station and rode 3 hours to Copacabana, where we spent the afternoon looking out over Lake Titicaca from the top of a steep hill lined with concrete markers representing stations of the Cross.
