May 16, 2004

Sucre, Bolivia

From Potosi we took a 3 hour bus ride to the official captical of Bolivia (or so I think, it is pretty confusing). Also known as Ciudad Blanca or white city since many of the buildings in town maintain the colonial white paint job. We arrived on a saturday night and found that everything we wanted to do was closed on Sunday. So we just kicked around town, eating now and then at the Joy Ride Cafe, which was very good. I restrained myself and didn't shell out the 23 bolivianos for the Erdinger beer though, that was two capirinahs after all. We met Barbara, a Canadian photo-journalist, here for the second time. We (well I) met her for the first time on the bus from Potosi to Sucre. Sarah recognized her from somewhere and it turns out that she had met her before in Guatemala in 1999, a small world after all.

After having a relaxing and warm Sunday we did everything we wanted to do in Sucre on Monday. The first thing we did was go to the Textile museum. This museum has many interesting displays of various indigenous textiles and has a weaver's gallery where you can watch indigenous people weave. It looks incredibly difficult to do well. The museum is trying to get native people to start doing high quality weavings again by selling their stuff in the museum's shop. They have lots of very very nice weavings in the shop and we did our part by buying 3 different things, one for our selves and two for other people.

We spent so long in the shop that we missed the noon dino truck. So we killed some more time until the 2:30 dino truck which was cutting it close to our 5:30 bus to La Paz. The dino truck takes you to a dinosaur footprint wall, the largest in the world. Tectonics have pushed a long ago beach almost vertical, and on this beach there are lots and lots of dino footprints. Sarah was a bit of a keener, answering all the guides questions about the various foot prints, aparently she likes Dinosaurs. The footprints are on a cement factory's land and were only discovered a few years ago as the cement factory removed all the usable lime from infront of the footprints. Luckily the soil that the footprints are on is of no interest to the cement factory.

Then it was back to the hostel to get our stuff and get on the bus to La Paz, which was supposed to take about 13-15 hours. We had one small problem with the axel which I helped with by providing some bright LED light but other than that no problems than traffic near La Paz and freezing cold temperatures in the middle of the night.

Posted by bforsyth at May 16, 2004 03:44 PM
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