¡Hola! As promised, this entry will be mainly about our diffident visit into the World of Might and Magic. But let's start from the beginning.

La Paz (meaning Peace) is with its 3600 meters above the sea level the highest placed capital in the whole world. The metropolis inhabited by 900 thousand little Bolivians is geographically divided into two parts. The City ( centre and a residential area for the rich) and El Alto (poor quarter spreading around the hills clinging to the basin of the City). Rossio's auntie owns a humble house in El Alto (on the Square of 1st May :) ) and haven't lived there for years so we were more than happy to establish our base of operations there.

The journey from El Alto to The City takes about 45 minutes using public transport (hahaha) and even though Rossio keeps on arguing about it, public transport isn't the right name for what is happening here. Forget everything you know from TFL. Here it's  hundreds or thousands of privately owned minivans with piles of numberplates and destinations tucked in the glove department and entering minivan 213 means you might be getting off a minivan 210 or 666 without changing cars. They just change the number (and therefore the destination) on the way (without even stopping or telling anyone). Each minivan has got its own tannoy-boy that works as a door control system and keeps on shouting like "Ceja, Ceja, Perez, Ceja, Autopista, Ceja, Perez, directo un Boliviano!" That is the direction the minivan is currently heading and a suggested price. I managed to catch this version of "Please stand clear of the closing doors, mind the doors" on my phone so check it up. Another quite interesting part of this transport Zoo are American ex-school buses called collectivos, usually painted in different bright colors. Surprisingly they seem to be in good shape and traveling in them doesn't feel like being in a fish can. Just one advice. Unless you are as crazy as Mort don't sit at the back, because you'll spend more time up in the air than sitting on your seat.

Rossio is an excellent host so we managed to taste a lot of local delicatessen, from which the most bizarre for Europeans would be a guinea pig. On the plate it resembles a squirrel hit by a truck (without the tail), tastes like a crossbreed between a rabbit and chicken and it doesn't have vast quantities of muscle matter. Still worth a try though. Another interesting edible is frozen, dried and defrozen (and possibly rotten) potatoes called Chuño (black rotten like balls) or delicious but unnamed cow's cheese (it's called simply Queso = Cheese) in the shape of an overgrown Brie. The photo illustrates the tasting of yet another local specialty (my revenge for the torture they put me to :)) )

And now straight to the Abracadabra stuff. Wandering through the markets high above The City we discovered several interesting alleys with stalls selling quite unusual artifacts. After some looking around we were starting to get an idea what's going on and our suspicion has been confirmed by careful asking around. It was a place where people go to ask higher spirits and to offer sacrifices to get their wishes and desires granted. It was noon and the sun was high up so we went to The City for lunch but I knew that I want to come back in the evening. Neither Mort nor Rossio were against and by 4pm we were back between smoldering sacrificial fires...

We started by walking from stall to stall collecting bits of information. As you can imagine the place was swarming with all kinds of loonies and not everyone was excited about talking to us. Inspite of all obstacles, mainly by using different types of covert tactics, we collected enough info to get a good idea about the clockworks of this place. It's a place of "prayers" where you can get help from the other dimensions in many different categories. Amongst the most common are health, luck, money, luck, etc. After a short time you could see that this place is being used by a large clientele. The babel of alleys creating this "Shaman's quarter" is divided in three sectors (you can tell by different color of houses). In each sector you will find stalls that sell ingredients as well as houses of Shaman's (called Maestros; Callahuayas or Huatiris in the native language Aymara).

Sacrificial ritual itself is a two part act. In the phase one the client meets up with the shaman in his "office". It's a shack 3x3 meters in size and there the client explains what he expects from the ritual as well as establish the price. The price is a sum of a cost of sacrificial ingredients and the fee for the ritual itself. Ingredients vary a lot. From what we saw in the stall there are different types of herbs and minerals, cow's fat, coca leaves, colored sweets of all shapes and dried sucklings of various animal species (most common was llama). Supposingly you can buy some "secret stock" for the purposes of black magic, but nobody wanted to talk about this. As they wanted us to believe, this place was only for white magic, which is defense and cure for the curses caused by black magic (though one old woman told us names of three shamans that do black magic).

After we got a lot of theory on the subject we decided that it's time to experience the real thing. We wished for safe return and prosperity of Bolivian nation. After many refusals (no cameras!!) we found an enchanter who was willing to conjure and so we finally saw the "real thing" with our own eyes. He popped out and came back with 30 Bolivianos worth of sacrifice and 20 Bolivianos went for his services. The ritual itself, while mumbling some words in Spanish and Aymara over and over, was a careful placing of ingredients onto big arch of paper. Phase two is taken the paper with sacrifice folded inside onto the burning stove (called la mesa) and setting it on fire. Again with a lot of Abracadabracamacaca stuff our enchanter was pouring on some alcohol into fire and this way he lost a bit of his eyebrows (photo). One word? Wow!!!

Once more I got to thank both Rossio and Mort, because they were simply great and this amazing experience couldn't have happened without them!!!

- translated by Mort.