I had gotten in touch with Eli and Jess, the American couple that I had met in Medellin, Colombia, and they had mentioned that they were in Sucre and staying at a place called Wasi Masi. I decided to head there as we had gotten on really well and figured it would be fun to hang out with them again.

My plan was to stay in Sucre for just over a week, doing Spanish lessons for a few days and then the touristy things, before moving on. How different things turned out...

I was pretty unwell when I first arrived in Sucre, with cold symtpoms kicking in. I went for a quick stroll to get some fresh air and to get my barings. As soon as I hit the streets I started to fall in love with the city. The old Colonial buildings were beautiful and the main square was a fantastic place to sit and people watch. I could have sat there all day but for my cold, so I spent pretty much most of the rest of the day in bed thinking through my timings re Spanish school and other parts of my trip and decided to spend the week recovering and doing some of the touristy stuff, and the following week doing Spanish.

Despite feeling sick I got up relatively early the next day to head to the Spanish school recommended to me by Jonathan and Viktor, the Swedes I travelled with in Guatemala. I was sold instantly when I spoke to Fabiola, a lovely lady who was the administrator for the school. I did a little test to determine my level and so they could find an appropriate teacher for me. I signed up for the following week there and then. The rest of the day was spent strolling around the town a little more. I had a vision of spending mornings at classes and the afternoon hidden away in some small cosy cafe revising what I had learned so I went looking for the small cosy cafe. Not managing to find exactly what I was looking for, and feeling slightly worse for wear, I headed back to the hostel to relax. I saw there was a BBQ that night so signed up thinking it would be a good way to meet people. I bumped into the hostel manager Roxanna who lived there with her son Antonio but she seemed to be quite grumpy and said very little.

That night I saw Eli and Jess at the BBQ and we caught up on travels in the past couple of months. They had already been in Sucre a week and this was to be their second and final week there. I also met Chris, an Aussie lawyer who was spending a few months away before moving to London to do a masters. We stuffed our faces with what turned out to be an unbelievable BBQ with great steak, chorizo and a fantastic spread of salad.

I spent the third day walking a little further afield around the town, getting to grips with the outer edges of it´s centre. I spent a lot of time in little places drinking cups of coca tea in an attempt to recover. In the evening, Chris and I had decided to head to Gringo Lingo, a language exchange evening at one of the local bars. The concept was simple, with each pair or threesome speaking in Spanish for five minutes and English for five minutes and then moving onto a different table. We enjoyed a few beers and although the turnout of locals wasn´t as great as it could have been, there were still plenty of people there to speak to and practise Spanish with.

The next day, Eli, Jess and I had arranged to head to Recoleta, a viewpoint above the city to see the sunset. In the meantime I had decided to work on my Spanish listening skills by watching one of the hostel´s Spanish films. Having been to Cuba, I decided that watching Che would be a good idea. It brought back some fond memories hearing the Cuban Spanish accent again after so long. Unfortunately, classic Latin American style, the DVD was broken and so I couldn´t watch the last twenty minutes of the film. Very disappointing as I´d really gotten into it. I opted to change tactic and read notes from my previous lessons in Nicaragua instead. Eventually, myself, Eli and Jess, accompanied by an Israeli lady we had met, headed up to Recoleta. It was a pleasant evening with clear blue skies. Sucre is at around 2,800m above sea level and in this season (winter), it is dry, hot in the sunshine and dramatically cools down in the shade and in the evenings. The walk took around twenty minutes with the altitude kicking in on the steeper parts towards the end. Once up there, we got a couple of snaps of a couple that had just been married and then took some seats at the Mirador Cafe, where we enjoyed a couple of beers while watching the sun go down behind the hills overlooking the city. Afterwards, we headed to a place called Nouvelle Cuisine, which had been recommended to me by a couple of people. For around $5, we got a free salad bar, a decent steak (the kind you´d maybe pay thirty to fourty quid for back home) and fries. Everyone was happy.

The weekend was set to be a big one in Sucre. It was the 204th anniversary of the Bolivian independence movement, and the city was set to stage a huge parade with marching bands and floats. I walked around the town during the day, and in the evening, we hit the town, going to a couple of bars on the square, before Chris and I bumped into some random Bolivians and ended up finding ourselves in a Bolivian karaoke bar at 4am in the morning. It was a good night, but it meant a late start on Saturday.

As it turned out, this wasn´t a terrible thing as the parade only really got going later in the day. We watched various floats and marching bands go by, as well as visiting a chocolate fair. That evening, Jess, Eli and I headed to the Simon Bolivar Park, where I had read there was a fountain show on Saturday evenings. We sat and watched for around an hour, as classical music played, and the fountain seemingly danced, chaning colours from reds, to blues, to purples etc etc. It was a nice way to spend a hung over Saturday night. Sunday was another lazy day spent reading up on Spanish notes before my first lesson on Monday.

The first day at school was great. I found my teacher Abel to be very good at explaining things and we got on very well too. We re-capped a lot of stuff I´d already learned such as past tenses but this really helped re-enforce things. We also did a lot of conversational stuff which helped even more with the fluidity in my speech.

Each day took on a fairly similar pattern for that week. I spent the morning at school, came back to the hostel (which proved to be cosier than any cafes) to eat and then do my homework, chatted to others in the hostel, or went and people watched in the main plaza, then went for food to a decent restaurant and then went to do some kind of activity. On Tuesday we went to Joy Ride Cafe to have a free Salsa lesson, Wednesday was Walleyball with the school. Walleyball was great. It is basically voleyball in a squash court, where you were allowed to use the walls. Thursday was a cookery lesson where we made a local dish called Falso Conejo (translates as False Rabbit) at a local person´s house.

The second Friday came around all too quickly and we headed out for food at a place called Abi´s Cafe. I´d had the steak here before and it was good so I thought I´d introduce it to the rest of the group. Abi´s was run by a really nice Belgian guy named Yves and they never failed to disappoint with the steak. At $6 with fries and salad, it was a steal. We had a relaxed night that evening, with just a few drinks as we had a big one planned for Saturday (and we were all getting too old for two big nights in a row!).

Saturday night arrived and we hit the town yet again. Chris, two German girls, Eli, Jess and myself had planned to meet for happy hour at a place called BiblioCafe for the 8pm-10pm happy hour. We had then planned to head to a place next door called Joy Ride from 10pm-11pm to catch the end of their happy hour which ran from 9pm-11pm. Genious. Eli and Jess were running late and met us at Joy Ride having already smashed back a couple of bottles of wine. We all played some drinking games and as we were about to leave, Eli realised he had ordered a litre of beer. He went to the bar to try and cancel his drink. A minute after he got back, his ´cancelled´ drink came. Argue as he might, they would not take it back, so he did the only reasonable thing you can do in a drunken state and asked for it to take-away (´para llevar´). We all burst out laughing and were amazed when they said yes. Welcome to Bolivia. So, we left the club with a bottle of Fanta that had been emptied out and re-filled (badly I might add - see picture in album) with Eli´s beer. We drank the beer from the bottle and headed back into BiblioCafe where there was a live music performance about to start. We grabbed another couple of beers whilst listening to a strange mixture of rock and blues. Chris and I were the last men standing and we headed to a club called Mitos where we stayed until 5am in the morning.

Sunday was a real shock to the system. We had booked to go rock climbing at 1:30pm and having woken up at 12:30pm feeling pretty terrible, I wasn´t looking forward to it. Chris was so worse for ware that he backed out all together. We needed to find a fourth person (the other two being Jess and Teresa, a Czech girl). That´s when we found Stevo. He had just arrived at the hostel, having been at a rave (in Santa Cruz, which is in the East of Bolivia) until 6am and then caught a flight straight to Sucre, yet he was raring to go climbing. So, off we went. Stevo turned out to be a great lad and we all had a great time with ClimbSucre. The first wall was challenging but we all managed it. The second was was really tough. Stevo took to the sport like a duck to water, with the rest of us struggling with the second wall. Jess plucked up the courage to have a second go and with an incredible amount of will power managed to do it. I tried a second time and with an incredible amount of feebleness failed....

I was loving Sucre so much and had met such a great bunch of people that I decided to stay for a third week. I took a couple more Spanish lessons on Monday and Tuesday and had to do a presentation about part of my travels in Spanish.

I had tried to arrange some voluntary work in the previous two weeks but this was proving to be a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. I had a stroke of luck when Teresa mentioned that she had a student that I could teach. She was already teaching two young kids and also had this university student which was proving to be a little much on top of Spanish school as well, so I gladly offered to help. Every day I had a lesson with Ruth who was an Indio girl studying English and Quechua at university. She wanted to practice her speaking and listening skills, so we sat and talked about various topics each day for an hour. I was really enjoying the teaching and it seriously made me consider whether finance is really what I want to do.

That week was a sad one as Chris, Jess and Eli all left to continue their travels. Stevo and I drowned our sorrows by going out on the Wednesday to a place called Nanos with a bunch of people from the hostel. This was most definitely a locals place. We were the only gringos in the club but we had a fantastic time there, again managing to dance the night away until 5am.

New faces had turned up at Wasi Masi and that Friday night, Stevo suggested that we have a Caipirinha night. We went out and bought a couple of bottles of Casacha, a lot of ice, sugar and limes and set about our jobs as barmen. The drinks went down a treat and soon most of the hostel was feeling good and ready to party. We headed out en mass to the square and hit Joy Ride for happy hour. Even Roxana was out partying with us. We ended up back in Mitos for another early morning dancing session.

Saturday was another big day for Sucre. There was a parade in town again. This time though, it was some kind of annual university parade, where teams of dancers from uni facultys all over the country dress up and dance in the streets with their marching bands in tow. It was a fantastic spectacle and made for another great night out in Sucre.

As week four approached I revised my plans again, and decided to travel with Stevo through to Potosi and Uyuni. The last week is something of a blur, mostly consisting of teaching Antonio and Ruth English and partying. Teresa, Stevo, a Swiss guy called Phillipe and I did manage to go Quadbiking which was unbelievable and also see some of the cultural parts of the city such as the huge cemetary and the Saint Felipe convent.

On the Wednesday, it was Roxanna´s (the hostel manager) birthday. She had really come to life since the first week. The frowns had turned into permanent smiles and the silence to casual conversation and jokes. I had learned that she was just 29 years old (she was pretty but looked at least mid to late 30s) and had had her son Antonio when she was just 18. She herself had been orphaned when she was 8 and had worked ridiculously hard to get herself where she was. We all agreed that she had an incredible story. She had invited us to a dinner that was to be cooked at the hostel. Afterwards, we made a load of Cuba Libres and again, most of the hostel came out, including Roxanna and her friends. We ended up at Nanos again, though sadly for the last time.

That weekend, we had another huge BBQ and a final Caipirinha. On Sunday, I had reserved a table for 18 of us (almost everyone staying at the hostel) at Florin, as something of a goodbye dinner. During the meal, the waitress kept coming up to me and asking if my group was ready to order food, drinks, whether the group needed anything else etc etc. It all seemed a bit strange but I assumed that because I had made the reservation they thought I was in charge. When we got the bill, it all became clear. The waitress explained to me that my order was not included on the bill because it was free for me, having brought my tour group to the restaurant. I couldn´t believe it, they thought I was Bolivian. All the others were in hysterics.

I had absolutely fallen in love with this place. The hostel was fantastic, the people were fantastic, the city was fantastic. Another place to join Medellin in being close to my heart.