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Last Updated on 23 May 2025
Despite being quite sick from eating a tree’s worth of coca leaves in the days (and hours) preceding NYE, I am determined to make 2015 in La Paz count. We met some English friends on our mountain biking trip down the “World’s Most Dangerous Road” earlier today day and they said they were going to the English pub for the night, and while it definitely isn’t my first choice of locations, we also aren’t really flush with options and therefore can’t afford to be picky.
The couple we meet up with is 29/31, a dentist and a lawyer, but that’s the great thing about travel/alcohol: age is just a number. In no time at all, we are tossing back shots of Sambuca and tequila sunrises like a bunch of teenagers, and the dentist is telling us about how much he loves ketamine.
Earlier in the day, I had eaten a whole bag of coca leaves thinking that if coca tea is helpful for nausea, eating a field worth of leaves would surely cure whatever was ailing me. I soon learn that this was a severely misguided conclusion, and have to dip out at one point in the evening to go vomit in the comfort of our own bathroom, under the pretense of grabbing the fireworks Aristo forgot at home. Everyone is delighted to watch some explosions when we get back, and no one is the wiser re: my vomiting.
The English Pub winds up being an absolutely wild time. No one knows how to party like a 30-year-old criminal lawyer. There are huge buckets of confetti being dumped everywhere and balloons all around, and a dj is playing really awful Top 40 music, but it is somehow fitting. By 2am, we are all sloshing around outside like a bunch of alcoholics and it becomes clear that tonight is the night to track down the elusive Route 36.
We had read about this particular bar on Vice, and it honestly seemed too ridiculous to be true that there was a roving cocaine bar in La Paz that somehow managed to evade the local police, yet was easily located by nearly all taxi drivers. How could we not investigate, though.. We may only be in Bolivia once and we certainly won’t be young and stupid enough next time to think that this is a good idea. No time like the present for bad decisions.
Our ket-loving dentist friend gets dragged home to take care of his girlfriend, but we are able to rope another English couple into coming along for the adventure. We flag a taxi down and shove our heads in the window and ask for “ruta treinta y seis” and to our surprise, he nods right away and we all hop in. Excitement levels are quite high.
The taxi driver stops and gestures to a door across the road, so the boys approach the man loitering around outside and are shooed in. We girls make some idle conversation in Spanish with the taxi driver, but quickly decide that we want to witness the place for ourselves because that’s really the whole point of this, so we too saunter up to the sketchy looking fellow who pulls up the door for us and shoves us up a flight of stairs. At the top, there’s another suss man we have to hand over some money to (about 20 Bolivianos), and then finally we are inside. The bar itself is barely lit by a few disco lights and green lasers, but there are already a dozen travellers inside energetically swapping life stories. We find the boys on a table in the corner, divvying up the “buy 3, get 1 free” grams, which cost 450 Bolivianos in total (which is a little over 60AUD at the moment), and we enjoy this once in a lifetime experience.
(I don’t actually have any photos of this as there is a strict no picture policy inside, and I actually took this rule really seriously because the owner nearly ripped the phone out of some girl’s hand when she took her phone out to make a call.)
I needn’t go into the gruesome details, but suffice it to say that we spent all of the 1000B that we had with us, made about 20 new best friends, and didn’t come out until the PM, where we had to struggle home across town in the judgmental light of day. When in Bolivia!
