La Paz (the city) rests up against the Andes . It has a median temperature of about 35-65 degrees year round. It is either very dry and dusty and windy, or very wet and muddy and windy. The summer months (November and December) see highs in the 60's. Still the nights are very cold and heaters are not used (and sometimes not available) at night.
      In the city of La Paz many modern connivances can be found including hygene products and toiletries. However the type and variety may not be similar to what we are used to in the U.S. Street vendors still provide most of the foods for the local buyers, but grocery stores are also cropping up around the city.
      Traveling into (and out of) the main road to La Paz the slope can sometimes drop 2,000 feet in a matter of minutes. Every town passed has a sign announcing its recently completed potable water system. The road is paved along the easy parts and dirt where it regularly falls victim to washouts and landslides, so speed varies from 50 to 3 mph.
      It is not uncommon to pass a family of five hiking to market, with three pigs on leashes. They are reminders that Bolivia is not only beautiful, but -- in terms of cash -- the poorest country in South America , and one of the 3 poorest in the world. Flying into La Paz is an experience. The plane climbs over the increasingly arid canyons of the Andes and skirts the frozen mass of 24,000-foot-high Nevado Illimani to reach the Altiplano.
      Skin-splitting dry and perched at an elevation of 2.5 miles above the sea, the Altiplano is home to most Bolivians, the native Aymara and Quechua speakers who prefer living closer to the sun, choosing the gasping, brilliant Altiplano over the sweating abundance of the eastern lowlands. The La Paz airport is at 13,000 feet, an elevation requiring -- because of the thinness of the air -- that the plane land at terrifyingly high speed.
      La Paz is below the airport. The road corkscrews into what looks like an immense bowl but is actually a canyon, a stone canyon whose walls are eroded into unlikely pinnacles. It's a big city, but dwarfed by its setting at the foot of Nevado Illimani. The glass skyscrapers look like ice cube trays. The more modest homes hung on the canyon walls look like dog houses. On the other hand, walking through La Paz actually increases its apparent size. It's the thin air, naturally, and the hills. The locals scoot around with ease and an unfair advantage -- bigger chests and more hemoglobin in their blood -- a result of being born at high elevation.
       In the streets of La Paz , there's always something different around the corner. In Amboro National Park it might be a bird called the Bolivian Earthcreeper. In La Paz , it's the possibility of getting a cash advance at a bank machine, then turning around and buying a dried llama fetus. The fetuses are for good luck, says the vendor -- you put them under the floor of your home. Not interested? How about a dried starfish? A plastic bag filled with mashed cactus?
      With twin tanks brimming with 40 gallons of gas, a four-wheel-drive truck struggles up and out of La Paz and across the stony pastures of the Altiplano, descending to the shore of Lake Titicaca . Black-and-white moo-cows plod through the fringing marshlands in the company of long-legged birds and to the east the ice mountains rise above the clouds. It's an idyllic scene until cutting wind remind you that life at 12,500 feet isn't so easy.
Atop a steep knoll weman evict from the rocky, frozen ground, the same root crops that the Incas harvested 500 years ago; using a steel blade lashed to a stick to pull out wrinkled potatoes and ulloco, a root like a ping pong ball colored with fantastic red and yellow swirls. The potatoes are one of over a hundred wild varieties found in the Andes . Most of the people here speak Aymara, the mountain language that predates the Incas.
       The adobe homes of the Aymara probably haven't changed much in the last millennium, either. With their backs to the mud walls the women sit in the sun and twirl wool on spindles or sort potatoes. The men tote cassette decks and tend to the herds of llama and alpacas, the animals that look much like camels because they are. They lack the hump, but not the heritage.
For long trips missionaries may pile into big open-backed trucks and hang on. It's no wonder the women are buried under multiple petticoats and the men don woolly ponchos and earflap caps -- they truly live outside.
      Charazani is outside of La Paz and a common missionary assignment. There is no electricity in Charazani Men idly chew coca leaves and women forever carry on their back either swaddled babies or some mystery cargo. The town is a drop of 4,500 feet from the Altiplano.
       Bolivia 's National Museum of Natural History in La Paz requested the aid of the American Museum of Natural History in the conservation planning of the newly expanded Ulla Ulla National Reserve another popular assignment for missionaries. One border of the preserve is the road down from Charazani, a road that was only completed two years ago." Completed" in Bolivia means that someone else made it down the road, so you might, too. It's a pretty good road, considering the river crossings and "don't-look" drop offs.
       The poverty is plain to see from the road: windowless huts with dirt floors; rough fields of banana and papaya on the unkind slopes. One can also see people whose arms and legs are covered with welts from the swarming insects. The children smile brightly, but it's not hard to imagine the family's suffering.
       There are beautiful things to see as well such as torrent ducks that launch themselves into foaming white water. The Cordillera Real owes much of its beauty to the lush highland valleys and humid mountain forests that lie on its eastern slopes, forming one of Bolivia 's four distinct ecological regions. The rugged terrain of the eastern Andes ranges from moderate hills to dangerously steep slopes. This steep topography ensures a constant variety of landscapes, from undulating terraces and plateaus to high mountainous areas, gorges, ravines and narrow valleys.
        The best-known region of the eastern Andes is the Yungas, a forested wonderland stretching from the glaciers of the Andes to the rain forests of the Amazon basin. Here the landscape is dominated by rolling hills and tropical valleys where coca and coffee plantations thrive, and natural wonders such as steam baths and waterfalls abound.