Another pretty city

  Sucre, Bolivia Wednesday, April 27, 2016

We had 2 options for transport to get to Sucre. Option 1. A night bus. minimum 10 hours. Un tarmaced mountain roads. In the dark - £2.50. Option 2. Flight. 35 minutes. during the day £25. No prizes for guessing which one we chose! When we arrived at the bus station.... no only joking :-) The airport was bigger than we thought it would be and hardly any people on the plane either. There were approximately 14 people on our flight and we had loads of room to spread out. And the price included an in-flight snack too - bargain! People who know us know that we don't normally fly anywhere as we like to see the land from ground level - you see all sorts of things from a bus window when you travel. But sometimes we have to consider the safety angle too and no way did either of us fancy waking up dead at the bottom of a mountain somewhere in the middle of the night. It is well known that the public buses often have tired drivers and they aren't always safe. Especially at night. It was only on the way into Cochabamba a few days ago that we had seen one bus hanging precariously down a mountain too. So on this occasion we felt we could easily justify a flight. We flew over some beautiful mountains too. A we left Cochabamba we could see the Cochabamba valley spread out below us. Then short a short distance away were the most incredible mountains and rock formations we had ever seen from the air. The mountains zigzagged up into the air in amazing colours. Wonderful! A taxi driver drove us to our hostel we had booked for the night saying "no bien, no bien" all the way. Was he just trying to sell us his mates place down the road or was he telling the truth? He was telling the truth! Luckily for us - although we didn't realise it at the time, they had given our room to somebody else and tried to sell us a room where the bed was only accessible by a 10ft long ladder. Yes the bed was 10 ft in the air. Needless to say we didn't take it and the man at the hostel rang around and found us somewhere else. They found the lovely quiet place of Casa Solariega. It was very clean and picturesque inside but the rooms were FREEZING! Actually everywhere is freezing here at night. Sucre is the capital of Bolivia - despite many people thinking it is La Paz. But it is Sucre and it is much much smaller. Sucre only has 200,00 residents to La Paz's 1.3 million, so it is much quieter all round. Its high too, at nearly 3,000 mtrs it is one of the highest capital cities in the world. And the old colonial centre of the city is also listed by UNESCO and there are rules to how it must be kept. The buildings must all be painted every 5 years to keep them looking nice and you can chose any colour you like as long as it's white. It is actually a very pretty city especially in the sunshine with the mountains towering in the background. There are a number of cafes around the main square and all usually packed as not many places here have good wifi - not strong enough to even check your email.  When you do find somewhere decent there is absolutely no guarantee it will stay decent for the next hour! So on our first day we picked one of these cafes at random to get a cup of coffee. We walked in and guess who was sitting there? Our friend Lars! First up rainbow mountain, then in Copacabana, now here. It really is a small world! Well it was good to see him and catch up again. We grabbed a coffee in there and agreed to meet up again later in the week. Which we did. We love the backpacker routes and how you occasionally run into the same people again. We love swapping stories with other travellers as they have so much experience of places we haven't been and tips for places we may be heading to. So many times we have re-routed ourselves to incorporate places we have been recommended but you never find in holiday brochures. And so many times we have been so glad we did. There isn't too much to do in Sucre but we did find a market about an hour out of town but we have written all about that in a separate entry. We learned that the amazing mountains we flew over on the way here, belong to a crater and you can get a hike out there but it was very expensive so we passed on that one. One evening we attended a show of Bolivian National Dancing and had a nice meal as we watched. It was set up very similar to many shows where the tables are laid out nicely on the floor in front of the stage, candles were lit on the tables and the atmosphere was really nice. But again we were freezing whilst we sat there watching. No one has any heating in this place! The dancing was really good actually and we enjoyed the show. Probably helped by the bottle of wine we consumed as we watched though - we can actually afford to drink wine here in Bolivia and it doesn't take much to have an effect on us these days. The Bolivian wine here is quite drinkable and a bottle of red is about £2.50. White the same but we seem to have found a red and stuck with it. By far the best thing we did here in Sucre though was visit the dinosaur park. By Bolivian standards (remembering the museum at Tiwanaku) it should have been dreadful. But it wasn't - it was great! We caught the dinosaur bus from the main square for £1.50 each return. Half an hour away - just on the outskirts, lies a quarry. This quarry used to slice off layers of rock (horizontal millions of years ago and pushed up when the Andes was formed so are now vertical). In 1986 they took the last layers of rock from this rock face and stopped quarrying that face. Over the next couple of decades, the layer of rock they had left, eroded away revealing underneath it, thousands of footprints left in the sand millions of years ago and now vertical on this rock face. Just imagine if they hadn't stopped when they did - all these amazing footprints would have been lost forever. Who knows what has been lost already. The quarry is still active so we had planned our arrival for the workmen's lunch-break when they give tours right down into the quarry. So see these amazing prints - over 5,000 of them (they hold the world record for most in one place) and the large array of tracks leading who-knows-where and made by who-knows-what-dinosaur was fantastic. Going down into the quarry meant we could get right up close to them too and really appreciate the size and sheer number of them. WOW! The geek in us loved this. So after a week here, cold and no wifi it was time to move on again. We liked Sucre but we were definitely looking forward to finding somewhere warm again!