Intro
It is nearly midnight, and the hostel is finally quiet after a day that felt heavier than a mountain pass. The Altiplano sun remained sharp over the city pavement, keeping the sky a hard, clear blue while I traded the saddle for a wooden chair. Today wasn’t about distance, but about the grit that accumulates when you stop moving long enough to actually look at where you are.
The Living Lore of San Pedro
- The morning began at 08:00 with a standard hostel breakfast and a four-hour grind of writing and vlog editing. By 13:00, I needed to clear my head, so I walked out to Plaza Sucre. The sun was intense, hitting the fortress-like walls of the San Pedro Prison across the street. That’s where I ran into ‘Crazy Dave.’ He’s a fixture there, a man who survived fourteen years inside that self-governing walled city where inmates have to buy their own cells. As he paced the plaza, the frantic fluttering of pigeons punctuated his stories of prison politics and the absurdity of living with your family behind bars.
- Dave is part survivor and part performer, painting a picture of a place that functions like a dark mirror of the world outside. He didn’t ask for pity, just a few bolivianos for his time. I listened for an hour, captivated by the gritty details of a life lived in a place where the guards don’t go inside. It wasn’t the kind of history you find in a museum; it was raw and smelled of the street, a stark contrast to the sterile route maps I’ve been staring at for months.
Salt, Grease, and Cow Stomach
- By 14:00, the hunger hit. I went on a hunt for provisions, grabbing apples, mandarins, and a slice of watermelon that I finished before I even left the stall. I also found a massive, leathery, salt-caked slab of charqui—dried cow meat—to keep in my frame bag for the leaner days ahead. It feels like wood in the hand and tastes like pure sodium, but it’s almost the only thing that survives the heat of the pack without turning into a science project.
- Lunch was a different kind of challenge. I settled into a small family-run spot for an ‘almuerzo familiar.’ The main dish was Panza rebosado: cow stomach encased in a thick, deep-fried batter. The heavy, oily scent of the batter hit me before the plate even touched the table. The starter soup was actually the highlight, savory and hot, while the stomach itself was a texture-heavy test of my palate. Instead of the usual sugary juice, they just handed me a single banana for dessert. It was functional, filling, and entirely unpretentious.
Compression and Conversation
- The afternoon was a deep dive into the digital side of this trip. Back at the hostel at 16:15, I spent hours working on my vlogging chatbot. I’ve been having issues with the 50mb Telegram upload limit, so I spent the session coding AI agents to handle two-pass compression and more robust logging for LLM API calls. Seeing the bot finally authorize a YouTube upload on its own felt like clearing a technical summit. It’s strange to be in the middle of the Andes, debugging Python scripts while the sounds of La Paz traffic roar outside the window.
- At 21:00, I met up with Max at a cafe called ‘Catch Your Breath.’ We’d met yesterday after the cholitas wrestling match, and tonight we got into the weeds of the ‘Aussteiger’ lifestyle—the German concept of dropping out of the system. Max is struggling with the pressure from home; his friends are all buying houses and getting married, and he felt like he was falling behind. We talked over a pickled aubergine sandwich, and I think seeing my dusty bike and hearing about the last 356 days gave him some permission to stop comparing his life to a mortgage schedule. We waved goodbye at 23:05, and now, at 23:45, my pack is finally ready for the Valley of the Souls tomorrow.
Overnight
I stayed at a hostel in central La Paz (the Saint Peters Llama), which served as a solid base for gear maintenance and digital work before heading into the Valley of the Souls.
Reflection
The most intense miles aren’t always on the road; sometimes they happen while sitting still and listening to a man talk about prison life in a public square.