Quite an important city is La Paz, and a large number of wealthy mine-owners reside there, drawing their incomes from rich tin mines in the neighbourhood.  There are also numerous stores from which the wants of the distant population that reside in the rubber country are supplied.  The larger proportion of the inhabitants are Indians, and I cannot help remarking that the Bolivian Indians, men and women, are about the ugliest type of human creatures I have yet seen.  Besides, they are very illiterate, and it is estimated that, of the total population of Bolivia, only about 30 per cent. can read or write.  In the south, Aymara is chiefly spoken; but further north, Quechua is the commoner language.  I saw several bull fights in the bullring of which the town boasts, but they were so very disgusting that I refrain from nauseating my readers with details.

The Cathedral was only half completed when I was there, and I understand is still in the same condition.  I was forgetting to mention that there was no British Minister or Consul in La Paz, and the story goes that, at some previous period, a Bolivian President compelled the British official representative to ride round the plaza seated on a donkey, but with his face to the tail; the consequence being that the Prime Minister of Great Britain figuratively wiped Bolivia off the map.  Anything which we required from the Diplomatic Service had to be obtained through the medium of the British Minister resident in Lima, in Peru.  This may now be altered, but I am not aware of the fact.  I remained several months in La Paz in the employment of a Bolivian magnate, but the remuneration not being commensurate with my ambitions, I eventually arranged to accompany the proprietor of a very large rubber forest on a trip to his properties on the higher reaches of the River Amazon, and hence my privilege of being able to offer you a perusal of my experiences across the inner ranges of the Cordillera mountains.  His daughter also accompanied him, and, although the journey is a most uncomfortable one in more ways than one, she stood the fatigue of many days’ riding on mule-back, over trails which did not deserve the name of roads, just about as well as any of the rest of us.

For a trip of this kind many provisions have to be made, as very little indeed can be procured on the journey in the way of good food or lodging.  We accordingly had to carry our beds and bedding, and in fact everything we could think of in the form of clothes, food, firearms, and, of course, the necessary accompaniment in liquid form.  Most of our baggage and what we might not require at a moment’s notice we sent on ahead with a day’s anticipation, and eventually on the 20th May, 1901, our caravan departed from the then capital of Bolivia, at 8 a.m.  Our conveyance, to start with, consisted of a coach drawn by four mules, and it took much longer to climb the steep “Cuesta” than it had taken us to descend on previous occasions already mentioned.  However, our animals were good and in about an hour and a-half we reached the top of the hill, and I took what proved to be my last view of La Paz City.