Standing in the footsteps of giants..(well, near enough)

---

Several people in Potosi tipped us of about the option to take a taxi from there to Sucre, thus saving us the pain of having to trail our bags back to the station. Given that the city is at such a height that we wheezed our way to the hostel a few days earlier, it was a no-brainer really, so off we set in the company of two business men who were on route to Sucre airport. The young cab driver has a certain career ahead in Formula One, but his tendency to drive on the wrong side of the highway at great speed may shorten any such ambitions.

A few days in the city had proven to be enough to take the edge off our jaded attitude to scenery, which was just as well, as it proved to be a beautiful 2 hour journey, through lush mountainous scenery, to the appropriate accompanient of some Bolivian music on the car stereo. Oddly enough, some of it was strongly reminiscent of The Pogues, although who was 'influenced' by who is uncertian.

Although our pleasant HI hostel in Sucre was located about 15 -20 minutes walk from the centre, we were unfazed by this, especially given Luke´s love of marching me around new towns (far easier given that Sucre is 1.5km lower than where we´d been). Our nerves were somewhat rattled however by the receptionist's repeated warnings to be very careful of our bags and not to hail a taxi from the street at night, as there had been incidents of dodgy taxi drivers robbing tourists, and to be on guard for fake policemen in town asking for our papers. With some trepedation we therefore set off to explore - as far as the safe sounding Kultur Cafe Berlin, part of the Institute Aleman, for a nerve bolstering coffee and cake.

The city over the next few days proved to be as safe as anywhere else, providing we took the usual precautions of not walking down dodgy looking alleyways late at night. Our radars were always tuned in for the soundtrack of creepy music following us, but all was well. Apparently the police and the tourist board has launched a campaign to stamp out the problems before they become an issue and put people off coming.

Sucre itself is a very pretty city, with most of the grand buildings in the centre painted white as a remnant from the colonial days. We spent a pleasant few days wandering around the town, sitting in the parks, sampling the cafe bars near the main plaza and generally taking it easy. One afternoon watching the Champions League match led to a chance meeting with a welshman who, in addition to his native languagues also teaches Japanese and Indonesian, and was in town to add Spanish to his reportoire. Surely one of a kind! The resultant drinking session put paid to our tentative plans to go watch the local team, Estudiantes, play that evening, but apparently they won anyway without the need for our support.

We did manage to get ourselves organised enough on the last day to do one token touristy thing, namely take the Dino Truck to the cement factory site where hundreds of dinosaur footprints were discovered about 12 years ago. The land has shifted 90 degrees since the brontosauri and velociraptors (Luke, please insert other names here) etc roamed the land, so you have the surreal sight of these footprints going up and down a vertical wall. It´s believed there was a lake there which they used to drink at, until a volcano erupted in the area, with the ash layer preserving the footprints until they were discoved by the factory excavations. A new visitor centre is due to open in May, after which point the prints will only be viewed through telescopes from a distance, so we were lucky to be able to get right up to them.

The main prints are brontosaurous, and you can also see places where they think velociraptors (the scary little ones from the Jurrassic Park film) were attacking them. It was an interesting way to spend a few hours, comically enhanced by the guide´s use of toy dinosaurs to illustrate what he was talking about. However, despite the prints and all the dinosaur bones we saw in Patagonia, part of me still can´t comprehend that these creatures did live and aren´t just the creation of some Hollywood screen writer.

Our final night was spent watching Sin City in the cinema lounge of the Joy Ride cafe. Great place if anyone reading this happens to pass though (but remember, they DO charge for the film..they just don´t advertise the fact). The next morning we were booked fly to Santa Cruz, stepping off the usual travellers route for a few days to meet a friend of my dad who moved here to marry a bolivian woman. Having never met him before, I didn´t quite know what to expect, but after over 2 months on the road, was looking forward to meeting a fellow Scot for the first time. We´ve met dozens of Irish, but where all the other Scots are remains a mystery....

---