Our travels have led us to witness all kinds of strange stuff - weird creatures and plants, bizarre customs and rituals, and even dried llama foetuses for sale in the market. However, the new title holder has got to be Bolivian Cholita Wrestling. For those of you who don´t know (and I can´t think why you would need to know - until now) - a "Cholita" is a lady who wears the traditional Andean dress - consisting of a funny little bowler hat, long plaits with pom-poms on the ends, embroidered shawls and layers of skirts. Typically, they look something like this:

Are you ready to rumble?

Sunday night, we went along to see "Cholita Wrestling" in El Alto, just outside of La Paz. If you take a low budget version of WWF, and substitute ladies in these traditional clothes for the usual "not-fat-it´s-just-relaxed-muscle" boys, you´ve pretty much got the idea. By the time you´ve chucked a couple of plastic chairs into the mix, thrown said ladies into the crowd and dragged them around by the pigtails, you get something more like this:

Truly bizarre, and far more convincing than WWF. There was shrieking, there was (I hope) fake but convicing blood from equally convicing scalp wounds, smashed furniture and lots of screaming fans. The great thing is, it´s not really for tourists - this has been going on for years to entertain the locals. What I want to know is, who thought of this in the first place?