La Diablada - Carnival in Oruro

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Hi all!

First up, just wanted to say sorry we haven´t sorted out the maps so that you know where we´re going. The maps on the web site are really difficult to work, but hopefully we may figure something out. Oruro is west of the country- I think that´s enough info 😊

What a journey!!

So the bus to Oruro was due to leave at 11.30pm. We had a few rooms in Potosi to leave our stuff in. Me being me decided to sleep for half an hour, then we got ready and went to get a cab to the bus station. Once downstairs Melanee said the bus was late- whopeee!!! another half hour sleep for me!! Then once again we got ready and set off for the bus station. The bus was a perfect example of having too short a bus journey. We left about midnight and arrived about 5am, so you see it was way too short! Luckily for us, the hostel let us into a couple of rooms they had available. So in our room we had 3 girls on a bed, 2 boys on the floor and another woman who didn´t want to touch anything sleeping on top of her guy (he was a big guy). We thought we had to see the opening of the carnival at 8 or 9, but luckily they decided that it was the same thing all day and we could sleep until mid-morning. Once up we moved into our proper rooms. One girl was horrified and disgusted to see a completely full chamber pot being removed from her room before she walked in! So if you haven´t guessed already it was a very basic hostel, but all our leaders could find at such short notice. At least we had a private room, even if there were only 2 toilets for the whole hostel with no toilet roll and a freezing cold shower.

So...the carnival. There´s not much to say as the pictures probably say more. It took us a while to find the guy with our tickets and actually cross the carnival path to get to get to a wobbly ladder to climb into our seats. The seats weren´t bad though. We had to buy some plastic rain ponchos because Carnival in Bolivia equals water bombs and white horrible spray stuff everywhere! Although the carnival in Brazil is more about dancing, ours was more about costumes and bands. I´ll just let you see the pictures!

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