Sucre

I love Sucre! I got here at 7am Wednesday morning after a rather torturous 12 hour overnight bus journey with the driver seeming to stop every mile for about 5 minutes for no apparent reason. But I got here in the end! And I feel very comfortable in this small city.

The place has kept a lot of it's colonial buildings and perhaps this european influence is partly what makes me feel so relaxed. There is also a big young population here as there's more than one university as far as I can tell, and that makes the people here seem the most modern that I´ve come across in South America so far. Or maybe I've finally found my travelling feet after a tense few weeks! I do know that it is going to be hard to leave for Potosi tomorrow and then on to Uyuni, especially when I haven't heard anything good about Uyuni. I have to go to the salt flats though - otherwise it would be like visiting England and not going to London!

There are so many delicious pastry shops and cafés in this country. I've got no idea how the population aren't all obese! and now in Sucre there are just as many delicious chocolate shops as well as the pastry shops! I think that I may have found somewhere that will help me put back on all the weight that I've lost recently (and then hopefully my trousers will stop looking like they're about to fall off!).

Yesterday I went to the dinosaur footprints that were discovered in the late 1980s as the area is being mined for concrete. They have been preserved in Sandstone so are erroding fairly fast, but next year UNESCO are going to come to the site to see if they will grant Bolivia $8million to pour latex over the wall! The footprints were slightly disappointing though as they are on a vertical wall and about 100 meters away from the veiwing point so it was impossible to get an idea of the scale of them.

I´ve just looked up in the internet cafe that I'm in and on the wall above me near the ceiling is the biggest moth that I have ever seen! It's wing span must be at least 25 cm! Amazing - I have to keep looking to check that I'm not imagining how big it is!

Anyway back to Sucre. After all the cultural things that I did yesterday I am going to chill today and visit some of the many chocolate shops that I have managed to somehow avoid in the last 2 days

I hope that you all have brilliant weekends. Wish me luck please for the 6 hour bus journey on unpaved road that I'm going to take tomorrow!

Love from Bec