La Paz: cable car as therapy

A lurch and a swish, a sudden sense of space beneath my feet - and I plunge headlong into one of the most eyeball-bending views in the world. The Andes mountains in widescreen, inverted cones of streets, shimmers of colour through the high, thin air. This is La Paz, Bolivia's principal city, as you have never seen it before - until last year, at least, when the world's longest urban cable-car network was strung up across its perpendicular topography. 

The Mi Teleférico ('My Cable-car') system links the pancake-flat, anarchic city of El Alto with steeple-steep downtown La Paz 1,500ft below it, ferrying down the unsung workers who enable Bolivia's administrative capital to function. Built by an Austrian company, the teleférico is not merely a feat of engineering - impressive as that is. It is also a kind of mass-therapy, an invitation to one of the world's most congested, frenetic and hard-working cities to float free of its shackles. 

If you have just arrived at La Paz's El Alto Airport - at 13,300ft one of the highest in the world - you may already feel untethered from reality. Even as I crossed the tarmac to the arrivals hall my skull rapidly filled with tiny fossil-hunters chipping away with devilish hammers - and they wouldn't depart for at least a couple of days. The headaches and befuddlement induced by altitude create a mental gauze through which La Paz appears all the stranger. But as you drive from the airport the eye is initially monopolised by the strangeness of El Alto, a lawless shanty town of cruddy red brick roamed by wild dogs, riven by gangs and ruled by vigilantes (Ladron pillado sera quemado vivo - 'Thieves will be burned alive' - is the ubiquitous message, reinforced by effigies swinging from lampposts like lynching victims). 

At this point there is no sign at all of La Paz itself - all you see is the Cordillera Real, the jagged range of snow-white peaks rearing in the east like a divan for the gods. Who'd have guessed that down the back of this granite sofa, clinging to invisible ravines, exists an entire city of 900,000 people? And then you plunge in, either by toll road or - these days - cable-car. 

Mi Teleférico has three lines in operation so far, with another six in the pipeline. I caught the Yellow Line, which whisked me from the Ceja, the 'Eyebrow' or cliff-edge of El Alto, down over the vertiginous streets of La Paz: less than 20 minutes for a journey that by vehicle, through all the snarl-ups and driver-machismo, would take twice or three times that. 

'This is the new way,' said the student I shared a cabin with proudly as we hovered across tin roofs, lines of washing, a parasol and deckchairs on a patio, an army guardpost, a football pitch (we were slightly lower than a hoofed clearance) and the twisting, tumbling Choqueyapu River. Hints of the discord below leaked upwards - barking dogs, honking horns - but otherwise we floated free and serene. 

Half a day later I was down there, in the mess - doing it the old way. The streets of La Paz are plagued by verminous shared minibuses, operated by syndicates, and tense-shouldered taxi-drivers who give no quarter. Even on the best of days the traffic tightens into almost unpickable knots - and there are frequent demos, strikes and bloqueos (roadblocks) to make your day go with even less of a swing. 

My taxi driver, a taciturn hombre, was in the thick of it, making little progress as he gunned for the well-to-do Calacoto neighbourhood deep in the south-east of the city. I asked him if the teleférico had eased traffic congestion at all. 'Not much, no,' he muttered, narrowly avoiding the side of a bus. But it's early days for the changing of habits and mindsets. And in truth, if you're a visitor and not bound by schedules, being enmeshed in the crazy street life of La Paz (at every junction there are jugglers, clowns or hawkers of improbable items) is all part of the city's wonky charm. 

As it happened I had an appointment in Calacoto - at another recent European innovation that confounds preconceptions of La Paz. Gustu Restaurant, which opened in April 2013, is the flagship of Melting Pot Bolivia, a non-profit initiative set up by the Danish nutrition guru Claus Meyer (he co-founded Noma restaurant in Copenhagen), dedicated to reviving Bolivia's culinary traditions. 

It may be super-cool - bearded hipsters sit at the bar working MacBook Airs and food is likely to arrive on bits of wood - but in the words of Gustu's PR person, Sumaya Prado, who met me after my sweaty taxi ride, it has 'social soul'. Aside from the cookery schools it has set up in El Alto it trains students from all over South America, and beyond, at no charge (after a rigorous selection process) and is currently promoting the street food of La Paz, served up over generations by the indomitable indigenous women, all bowler hats and layered skirts, known affectionately as cholitas (more of this later). 

Gustu aims, in its small but exquisitely calibrated way, to make Bolivia proud of its traditions ('The project is beautiful, it's trying to change the face of my country,' Prado told me). It's a laudable goal at a time when society's enmities and inequalities, between the majority indigenous population and the mestizos who make up the rest, have been stoked by the populism of President Evo Morales. 

There is a founding myth about La Paz, celebrated in a mural in an underpass in El Alto. In the 18th century a character named Tupac Katari led an indigenous rebellion against the Spanish, besieging the colonial forces in La Paz from his base in El Alto. A member of the Aymara people, who come from the altiplano and cordillera of Bolivia and Peru, Katari was eventually captured and executed but before he died he made a vow that has become a rallying cry for Bolivia's indigenous movements: Volvere y seré milliones - 'I will come back and I will be millions'. 

These days the mestizos of La Paz are apt to glance up at the cliff edge of El Alto and agree semi-humorously that the prophecy has been realised - however swiftly La Paz grows, El Alto, the de facto capital of the Aymara, grows faster. But that's the striking, and exciting, thing about Bolivia compared to its neighbours - the enduring vigour of its indigenous culture (which has been all but wiped out in Chile, for example), bubbling up in the extraordinary dress of the cholitas, their ancient superstitions and the places where it all collides and carries on, the streets and markets of La Paz (which one former resident described to me as 'not just one city but many cities living together with respect'). 

The place everyone has heard of is the witches' market, lined with stalls and shops selling potions, amulets and paraphernalia for appeasing the fates of the Aymara cosmos: candles for days of the dead, dead newborn llamas and llama foetuses, offerings to Pachamama (Mother Earth) - as well as lots of stuff, such as 'viagra cubana', for putting lead in a chap's pencil. But to meet ancient Bolivia head-on you need to go for the street food. 

The idea of doing this runs contrary to time-honoured advice for Western travellers in developing countries: if you value your gastric health avoid anything cooked and handled on the pavement. Melting Pot Bolivia has scraped this maxim into the swing bin by training a selection of women around the city in exemplary hygiene, business and marketing practices and creating a guided tour around the stalls they run. The project is called Suma Phayata - 'Well cooked' in Aymara - and, said Gustu's Sumaya Prado, it's a unique opportunity 'to experience the real city - while you are eating. To try the street food, which you don't do in many countries. And to rescue the position of these sellers in the gastronomic culture.' 

Suma Phayata is at the pilot stage with just five women signed up but the plan is to increase its scope by ten- and then a hundred-fold so that by the end of 2016 there will be 500 high-quality food stalls across the city to choose from. For me it was a chance to make up for a frustrating evening at Gustu itself, when altitude sickness prevented me finishing what was an excellent dinner of delicate fish (smoked trout from Lake Titicaca followed by Amazonian catfish). 

From market stalls in the Zona Sur to the Mercado Lanza in central La Paz I ate tucamanas (fried empanadas with a variety of fillings, including prawns with cheese, and a choice of llajua - tomatoes and chillies - and other sauces); sandwiches de chola (baked leg of pork, with pickled carrots and onion and chicharron - crispy pork rind - on the side); and sandwiches de chorizo (sausage sarnies in baguette-like marraqueta bread). Delicioso, every one, but it wasn't, or wasn't just, about the food. 

It was about the life that jostles around it - the security guards, bellboys, lustrabotas (shoeshine men) and office workers whose punctual stomachs summon them to the same place at the same time every day - and the women who feed them. Above all it's about these women, doughty characters with faces browned and etched by hot sun through thin air, who can trace their bloodlines back to the pre-Inca civilisation that sprung up around that bellybutton of the world, Lake Titicaca, just a couple of hours' drive north-west of La Paz. 

Each spills fragments of her story as she slices and fills - the children she has put through university, the legs of pork she bakes overnight, the disabled son she has to care for, the recipes she inherited from her mother or grandmother that she will never disclose ('Like Coca Cola!'). The long, long days of work. 

'I don't stop,' says Elvira Goitia (in the Mercado Lanza), 'except for New Year's Eve. That's when I can dance and cry.' And she spoons relish for a man in a hurry, in the vertical city that never stops. 

Published in the Sunday Telegraph on October 4, 2015