COCHABAMBA

Cochamba was supposed to be a 6 hour journey from La Paz which ended up being a 10 hour journey, thanks to numerous stops to pick up and let off people. Our view out the window on the journey wasn't great either with constant child beggars on the side of the roads with hands out looking for money! We did this journey on the 21st of December, the end of the world according to the Maya calendar and we thought to ourselves "what a way to spend our last day on earth."!!!

Things didn't get much better when we eventually arrived into the Cochabamba. We decided to go with a hostel recommended by the Lonely Planet called Residential Familiar. It was not our best choice, the toilets hadn't been cleaned since the LP was written, and the beds were like prison beds.(Not that we would know about them firsthand of course!)....let's just say 1 night was too long to be there...in fact 1 minute really was enough.

Luckily the town was nice enough so we strolled around a good bit and headed up the main tourist attraction, their very own Christ statue, Chirsto de la Concordia. Meant to be bigger than the one in Rio, but without the same spectacular surroundings!

From there we hit Sucre, our Christmas destination.

SUCRE

Sucre is a really nice town, very pretty with lovely parks and plazas. We really enjoyed pottering around the place getting all we needed for our Christmas dinner away from home. It had a great fresh food market which helped to make a decent dinner for all 14 in the hostel on Christmas Day....needless to say all the others staying in the hostel were delighted to hear that Shane was a chef and wanted to cook!!!!It was like an xmas pressie to them all!!

The only other thing we did for the first time here was go to the cinema and watched The Hobbit!!!It was nice to do something from home over here!

Christmas Day wasn't the same as being at home but it wasn't too bad either!! We spent the day eating, drinking, watching movies, playing games and sharing travel stories with all the others in the hostel, our Christmas Day Family!!!

After chilling in Sucre for about 4 days we decided that it was time to move on so we headed to Tupiza via Potosi. We didn't do much here apart from have one of our worse meals so far and slept in a very basic hostel! So we were happy to be up early the next day to head to Tupiza and book our Salt Flats Tour.