Illimani

Hundreds of people bustle along the streets, selling home-made DVDs, second-hand clothes, fresh fruit and vegetables. Women in thick velvet skirts, their waist-length black hair braided into two plaits, stroll between smelly buses, honking cabs and crashing motorcycles. We make our way through the crowd with one large and one small backpack and two additional ski bags. We are constantly bumped into and hardly believe that we will ever make it to the cab rank in front of the bus station with our 65 kg of luggage! Finally we make it. "Hola chicititas, que es?" The cab driver looks at us somewhat incredulously as he ties the ski bags to his roof. Skiing in the huge city of La Paz seems to be a rarity – but our mission is working: in the next two weeks we want to climb two peaks and go down in history with two "female first descents".