¡Hola!

Last weekend I went to a 'nearby' national park, called Toro Toro, with six others from Sustainable Bolivia.The road out to this area is notorious for being washed away whenever there is a storm, but we were very lucky and had nothing but blue skies the whole weekend.

Our hostel was a sweet little place with lots of flowers in the garden, loads of very anti-social but very pretty pedigree cats, and a very weird but adorable pedigree dog.On the Saturday we headed out on a long walk in the baking sun down into a massive canyon that had steadily cut its way through the valley.The valley itself was unique; I'd never seen rock formations like these before.Apparently during Pangaea, when all of the continents were stuck together, this region had been at sea level; now the valley floor was as high as Cochabamba (about 2600m).The tectonic forces had squeezed great big mountains out of ground and curled the edges of the plateau up by 90 degrees, leaving behind a ridge of humps rounded off at the edges by the rain.It was totally spectacular.

One of the most special things we saw though were the dinosaur footprints that had been left behind in the numerous dry river beds.There were quite a few, mostly from bipedal carnivorous species, but we also saw massive ones left behind by a huge herbivore, like a brontosaurus or something.

The canyon itself wasn't that deep, maybe only 300m, but it's the best one I've seen yet; it looked like a proper canyon should, with straight edges, unlike that disappointing Colca Canyon we visited near Arequipa in Peru.

In the afternoon we chilled out by some amazing waterfalls, swam in the water hole underneath and then climbed the ridiculous number of stairs back up on to the plateau and back to the hostel.That evening we mostly chilled, ate some great home-cooked Bolivian food and get to bed early, since we had an early start the next day.

Despite our guide being an hour late, having got wasted the night before, the next morning we trekked across the plateau over to some massive natural caves, which we explored for a couple of hours.It was not exactly pot-holing, but there were lots of tiny cracks and tunnels that we had to crawl through.The confined spaces didn't seem to upset anyone though and, in fact, the caves were a real highlight of the weekend.After a merciful lift back into town in a car, we had a big lunch before heading back home on the six-hour journey to Cochabamba.This time we were driving during the day, so we could see just how perilous the roads were (which we were negotiating in a front-wheel-drive Toyota Ipsum with eight people in it!), and also how jaw-dropping the landscape was.Bolivia really has some amazing places to visit, and very few backpackers seem to know about them; we didn't see a single one the whole time we were there and we pretty much had the entire valley to ourselves.

Here's to the next trip to the salt flats during Spring Break; only a few weeks to go!

R

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