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Rich & Alli's Travels
Finally we got to leave La Paz. We left on an overnight bus to Sucre.
Allison was ill the whole night before so we made sure we got a bus with a toilet. However when the bus set off some indingenous woman decided to park herself in the aisle next to Allison. She sat on the floor for almost the whole journey and smelt really bad, was a definate soap dodger. Rich tried to get her to move but she seemed like she was pretending she didnt understand. Was very likely she didnt have a ticket and was probably a friend of the young attendant on the bus. Was a very frustrating journey but we eventualy arrived after 12 hours on the stinky bus.
Sucre was a really nice city, much nicer than La Paz. There was a nice plaza in the centre, although too many shoe shine boys. They all seemed intent on polishing our trainers and some only looked about 6 or 7 years old. You feel sorry for them at first but after being asked about 20 times in 5 minutes you soon lose patience.Well Allison did, didnt realise they would understand get lost or youll get a thick ear, but they seemed to!
We arranged a trip on the Dino truck. Literally this is a truck with wooden benches in the back all painted up with cheesy dinosaur pictures. The truck takes you to the national park about 6km from Sucre centre.
We arrived after about 20 minutes and were given a guided tour around the park museum where there were lots of models of different types of dinosaurs. We were then led to the grand finale, the famous dinosaur tracks.
The trackbearing surface is in an active cement quarry which consists of a limestone wall with a shear size of 25'000 square meters. The wall is covered by dinosaur tracks. After seeing the lines you cant help but be a little disappointed. I think we expected to see huge footprints in the ground that you could walk in or something but they are still impressive as apparently Sucre is the largest dinosaur tracksite known on the planet.
The tracks are protected by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization)
however, the strange thing is that these dinosaur tracks are located beside an open pit mine... meaning that as long as the mining continues, it will be extremely difficult to conserve the tracks as vibrations from the mining cause cracking in the rock where the tracks are located. Hopefully UNESCO will find a way to preserve these in the future.
After the dinosaur excursion we got a bus from Sucre to Potosi (3 hours) and then a connecting bus from Potosi to Uyuni (7 hours), where we went to see the famous salt flats.
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