Santa Cruz - Samaipata

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A pity really that I rushed through La Paz from bus stop (arriving from Titicaca) to bus terminal (leaving for Santa Cruz) - La Paz is really a beauty when you get the first glance at it from above in the afternoon sun. Undescribable, so I won't even try. And I didn't stay anyway...

I took a sleeper bus to Santa Cruz, which was sort of a waste, since the roads are so bad that you can't sleep anyway. So I mainly dozed for 18h - when I was awake for while at around 3am, my first three sensations were: (1) the landscape outside must be beautiful (tree-silhouette-guessing: subtropical), (2) I don't have a headache, and (3) my cold is almost gone all of the sudden. My next thought was "why on earth am I not doing this trip during the day - it must be beautiful outside!"

But oh well - arriving in Santa Cruz was not all that impressive after all. What struck me most was that you can really see that Sta Cruz is a lot richer than the altiplano. An amazing amount of glitzy 4x4 on the street, and houses tend to be bigger, and better built, and painted rather than only clay. Another difference are the graffitis on the wall: from "vota si - autonomia" (Sta. Cruz, being annoyed by financially supporting the poorer regions of the country, voted for autonomy) to "Evo - asesino" (in this rich part of the country, support for the president is more than low - while in La Paz, wall graffitis go in the direction of "Evo - together we can make it" - you can see that Evo Morales is a president for the poor but not for the rich).

Anyway, I wanted to stay overnight and then head on into Paraguay - but when I arrived early morning at the hostel (shattered from the nightbus), it was just fully booked out. So after a brief phase of frustration, I took a collective taxi to Samaipata, in the beautiful mountain regions 2.5hours away. And am about to get stuck here. It's positively lovely, and a really beautiful area, although unfortunately today it´s raining and we had to cancel our national park tour. So I´m hanging out in a cozy little hostel with hot chocolate, nothing much to do, and a definite feeling of holiday. It´s nice to stop once in a while....

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