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Published: June 30th 2008
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We left Brazil and crossed over the border into Bolivia... and our first experience of Bolivia was on a night train to Santa Cruz. The train has been nicknamed the infamous Death Train, as in the past people used to ride on the roof as they put all the contraband inside the train, and the train used to derail all the time so the people use to fall off the roof and die! Luckily we had seats inside the carriage and even though it was probably one of the roughest and bumpiest trains we'd ever been on, it stayed on track!! It was fun to watch the staff try and serve food from the trolley and then for us to somehow try to eat it and drink.
We arrived in Santa Cruz and spent most of our time shopping for a new camera, although there didn't seem much in Santa Cruz to see so luckily we didn't miss out on too much. There was a nice square, as it appears there is in all South American cities, where we found a nice bar to relax in for a while. There were plenty of shops selling electronic items so it wasn't
hard to find a camera... just hard to find one we liked as we were never quite sure what shops were selling real cameras or fake/refurbished ones.
After our shopping expedition in Santa Cruz was all finished, we took a short flight to Sucre. Sucre is at about 2800 meters above sea level so it was our first introduction to altitude, but still pretty low compared with the rest of where we were going in Bolivia! It was here we met up with another group who we would be travelling with through Bolivia and Peru.
Sucre is a beautiful city and great to walk around. It is full of markets and shops and woman walking around in colourful clothes. We had a tour of the city to see some of the highlights and went up to view the city from the nearby hills. We also visited one of the museums that showed the history of the weaving and had examples of the local dress, everything is so colourful. The local guide we had recommended a good restaurant one evening that had a traditional show, so off we all went to see what a traditional Bolivian show was to
The dinosaur footprints...
Were they really walking up a cliff face??? experience a bit more of the culture. It had some interesting dancing and some pretty cool costumes!
One of the other "attractions" near to Sucre is the dinosaur footprints fossilised in a rock face that had been discovered over 10 years ago. They had only been discovered by chance when the mountain was being mined. We were all a bit sceptical but a few of us went to visit anyway, the footprints were on the side of the mountain, but we were told that it used to be a river bed 65 million years ago before the Andes mountain range had formed, which had raised the mountain that they were found on. The dinosaurs had not walked up a vertical cliff!!!! It was completely tacky and they had huge plastic replicas of dinosaurs but its not every day you get to see real dinosaur footprints, even if they were 200 meters away!!
The company we are travelling with has linked up with local charities to help the people in the areas that they travel to, and in Sucre they support a local children's orphanage which we got to visit. There were just under 50 children between the ages
of 3 - 17 and they were so happy to see us turn up. Our group brought along some milk as they hadn't had milk for a month, and stayed for a few hours playing with the kids, all they wanted was a hug and some attention from us all... and to wear our sunglasses! GAP, the tour company we are with, needed to go and buy some furniture for the orphanage so we went with our tour leader and ended up buying blankets for all the children. We handed out the blankets when we returned and the kids all wanted their photos taken with their blankets wrapped around them, they didn't want to let them go! Hopefully it brought a bit of joy to their day, it seemed like it did, and will help keep them warm at night.
Striking is apparently a national past time in Bolivia, and we definitely got a feel for that one day in Sucre as we were told by the hotel staff that a lot of things would be shut due to strike action. Luckily we were not travelling anywhere that day as we bumped into a few people who had been
travelling during other strikes and got stuck as the buses or trains were not working, so they had to fly out in the end costing lots of money. It was a good excuse to go shopping as some of the shops were open and a few nice restaurants too so we were not really effected too bad.
Next stop is Potosi, where the altitude really kicks in at just over 4000m. Hopefully we will not suffer from any altitude sickness...
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