Sucre!

This place is known as "The White City" It is a legal requirement that every building is white-washed once a year here. As you can imagine, this makes for a beautiful colonial city. As well as this, Sucre boasts the best University in Bolivia. We had a brief but enjoyable stay here. On our first day we went to the University tourism office and found a tourism student who kindly offered to give us a 3 hour private tour of the city. She was lovely and very knowledgable of the City´s history. It was a great opportunity to get to know a Bolivian girl of our age. She took us up to the roof of a former convent (now private girl´s school) to view the city at sunset. What a spectacular view.

That night we went to the cinema to see some action/rom com flick. We went to the only supermarket in town to stock up on snacks, but when we arrived at the screen we were told we had to lock away our backpacks and couldn´t bring the food in (which I suppose is fine). BUT, on our way out we saw a dosen Bolivians strolling out of the screen with their backpacks!! ANGER! This is just one example of the descrimination we have encountered here. Later on, we met a group of travelers at the hostel. Most were French and some Italian. Between the 8 if us there were 5 languages being spoken. Roses and I felt really overwhelmed (and somewhat frustrated) at having to switch between them every couple of minutes. I was most unamused to find that Spanish has taken over my brain to the extent that I can no longer speak Italian but "Spanian/Itañol.

One of the highlights of Sucre was the dinosaur tracks! Outside the city is a sheer, grey rock face lying amongst regular rolling mountains which was once flat lake land before the rising of the andes. This is covered in around 20,000 dinosaur tracks from around 500 different species, the most extensive archeological site of its kind in the world. Our guide talked us through an interpretation of the tracks. So much can be told from the prints: weight, walking pace, pelvis type and herd habits. There were also bone remains from various species and a replica model of a T-Rex skeleton. The largest T-Rex skeleton was found in Southern Argentina and measured up to 38 meters in length! It was amazing to see these prints and artefacts. For me, dinosaurs have always felt like a fairytail from my childhood. Here I was actually awakened to the fact that they DID indeed exist (as stupid as that sounds).

Our last night in Sucre was spent at a show called "Origenes". It was a dinner and show consisting of traditional folklore music, dance and costume from the various departments of Bolivia. I really enjoyed it. Although some of it was clearly made-up/ over-dramatised for us gringos! The coolest part was the amazing masks that they wear for Fiestas and other indigenous religious ceremonies. The show culminated in the dancers running into the crowd and grabbing an audience member each to dance with them on stage. I got picked by a green clown. It was most surreal. We danced (probably like clowns), gringos and Bolivians alike while Roses struggled to stay upright because she was laughing so much.

At the beginning of our trip Roses and I were talking about how great it is to meet interesting people from all over the world. In the last 3 days these are the people we´ve met: an Evangelical American missionary whose aim is to convert indigenous people (who incidently already have religious beliefs which are thousands of years old), an investment w***er, a Lebanese guy who advertises Marlborough lites (who boasts about using women with their t*** out to hand out free fags) and an American medical student who wants to practise in South Africa because it´s an easy stepping-stone into working with "poor people", but has never heard of Apartheid.

We send you all love from La Paz!
Clara xx