After another delightful night bus, we turned up in Sucre and were slightly surprised at the contrast between Sucre and La Paz. Where La Paz was busy, bustly, poor, and grungy Sucre was quiet, clean and quaint. All the buildings are white and apparently it is the law that they have to be repainted once a year! The buildings have a colonial style and the streets are cobbled. In both cities they make claims for being the capital. Apparently Sucre was given the title of capital city when Bolivia gained independence and it has been allowed to keep the official title but La Paz is where all the government buildings are and it certainly feels more like a capital city. It's so confusing that I know just think of Bolivia as having two capital cities.

Our new guide, JP, took us on a walking tour around Sucre where we visited the main plaza with its churches and kind of tacky Eiffel Tower rip off. He also took us to the city's cemetery which seems like a weird place to visit but it was actually eerily pleasant. It had lots of elegant mausoleums big enough to be houses as well as tiny little windows for the poorer people where they can have a little shrine for their loved ones. It must be a catholic thing because I've never seen anything like this in the UK, not that I make a habit of visiting cemeteries! Later we had lunch overlooking the plaza. The food was unexceptional but there were nice views.

I had read that in the nearby area there were some fossilised dinosaur footprints which I thought would be interesting to see. JP advised us that the area I was talking about had been turned into a tacky kids theme park and you could only see the footprints through binoculars. He said there was another area where you could walk right up to them and touch them which was much less touristy so we organised for a guide to take us there. It involved taking a minibus onto a road that looked suspiciously similar to the Death Road near La Paz. Apparently a lot of the roads in Bolivia are treacherous and I was suddenly glad I couldn't see the roads in the night bus we took. Fortunately we didn't go too far along the road before we stopped and got out to trek to the footprints. It was an unexpectedly tricky hike along slippery rocks and often I had to climb using my hands too but it was fun until the really steep bit at the end (we were still at high altitude). At one point we saw the wreck of a car which must have fallen from the road and it was really horrible because we could see all the belongings from the car strewn about the place. I'm pretty sure whoever was in that car didn't survive.

We finally reached the footprints which were on a vertical wall which confused me slightly - spiderman dinosaurs?? Apparently the area used to be a lake where the dinosaurs came to drink and so their footprints got fossilised in the mud. Then the tectonic plates moved and the Andes formed so what was on the ground now became vertical. Some of the prints just looked like holes in the wall but we saw one T-Rex print which was so detailed you could see the claws and skin prints even. With a bit of imagination it was really a great site and the best part was we were the only people there.

One evening when going out for dinner we saw hundreds of people out in the streets. There was some sort of protest going on about the Bolivian miners. JP told us that a striking miner had been shot by the police in La Paz so I'm glad we were no longer there. We had heard stories from other tourists of how they couldn't get in/out of La Paz due to protesters closing the roads and running around with guns. By contrast Sucre's protest was sort of peaceful but there were a few load bangs every now and then, probably dynamite. JP advised us it would be safer to go straight back to the hotel after dinner in case it got violent. We stuck to the tourist restaurants but still attempted to eat some local food. Some of the guys ordered Pique which is a traditional dish consisting of an enormous plate of chips, meat, sausage, cheese and tomato based sauce. Fortunately when we left the restaurant all the protesters had gone but we stayed at the hotel anyway and played cards the rest of the evening.

Given that we love hiking so much the last day we hiked up all the hilly cobbled streets to a viewpoint over Sucre. It was quite a nice view but it was actually more interesting watching all the school children playing football around the square and "accidentally" kicking the ball over to us gringos! There wasn't too much to do in Sucre and we had 3 nights there but it was quite pleasant just taking our time and relaxing rather than rushing around everywhere. We even managed to get some bits and bobs done like uploading some photos and Bryan also got a bit of a dodgy haircut! By the time we left I felt like I had done all I wanted in Sucre and was ready to move on.