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CHAPTER 2
THE MOCHILEROS

Although La Paz lies in a valley, it is still the highest capital city in the world, almost twelve thousand feet above sea level. Despite modernisation it has retained the character of a prosperous colonial city. We arrived on a bus crowded with locals. I wandered around the monumental sites: Plaza Murillo, where all the major government buildings have been located since colonial days, and San Francisco Square, where the Jesuit friars built their monastery in the seventeenth century. In the narrow alleyways that lead away from these plazas are shops selling the finest handicrafts of the continent.

Up Sagarnaga Street are the wooden booths of the bustling witchcraft market of Pachamama, the Andean goddess of the Earth. The women hawk good-luck charms, healing herbs, and spell-brewing grasses, never revealing the true nature of their wares.

Peddlers swarm the sidewalks selling pastries and fruit. Bolivian music blares from record shops: the sounds of the charango, flute, and samponia,