Picking up from Crossing into Bolivia: Tiwanaku and the City That Defies Gravity. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

The Witches’ Market

With fireworks and stun grenades echoing through the city and riot police on every corner, we headed for the Witches’ Market.

Not a tourist market. This is where La Paz residents come for the things they actually need — dried herbs, potions, charms, figurines, and the small deity that tradition says should occupy every home: Ekeko, round-bellied and laden with miniature goods, kept fed with cigarettes and coca leaves in exchange for a year of abundance. The stalls run for several blocks up a steep cobbled street, herb stacks and dried frogs and small stone amulets laid out with the same matter-of-fact confidence as a greengrocer’s. Along the front of the stalls, arranged by size: llama embryos at various stages of development. A full-term pregnancy takes eleven months. The further along, the more expensive. They go into the foundations of new houses — an offering to Pachamama, buried before the first brick goes up, meant to bring luck and protection to whoever lives there after.

For luck.

It was explained with complete seriousness, by a woman who had clearly explained it many times before and had not once found it strange. We bought some herbs.

The streets outside were blocked, the air carried smoke, and riot police stood at intervals along the road. We did not feel unsafe. La Paz has its own logic, and once you accept that, it is perfectly fine to browse for dried llama embryos while a protest unfolds two streets away.

Valle de la Luna

The story goes that Neil Armstrong once visited and said the landscape reminded him of the moon, and the name stuck — true or not, it fits. The Valley of the Moon sits above La Paz, on the southern edge of the city where the suburbs simply give up and the erosion takes over — eroded clay formations in colours that have no business being on Earth. Spires, ridges, and channels carved by rain into the altiplano over thousands of years, the whole thing looking like the surface of another planet, still being reshaped by every wet season that passes through it. There’s a marked walking trail through the maze of it, narrow enough in places that passing another group means someone steps back into a channel and waits. The photos don’t show how interesting it is. Some places need to be stood in — even if ruined a little by the building developments creeping across the valley from the suburb next door.

Back at the hotel we got into the lift with two local ladies. It was the first time that Janine was the tallest in a group.

I could not help but mention it.