Sucre and Disappointing Dinosaur Tracks

TAPA's super-keen new social director, Ana Silvia, had organised a "Talent Show" evening for Thursday. She'd sent out invitations about 3 weeks ago. Alexis came back from Puerto for the occasion, though really it was an excuse for him to have a long weekend with English-speakers. He gets a bit lonely in his little jungle village without Jonathon, who is now volunteering in Cochabamba. The talent show idea had seemed pretty lame but it was a good warm up to a night out. We had a barbecue of, amongst other things, anticucho (pigs' hearts) - or rather, the non-vegetarians did, I had some delicious vegetable soup that Ximena made - and were treated to some traditional Bolivian dance from a troup in funky costumes. The evening quickly turned into an excuse for more karaoke, since the only other talent anyone came up with was Kate's hula-hooping. Though Ellie later displayed a talent for downing a litre of Taquiña through the long tube of a broken hula-hoop, with the help of Jonathon pouring the beer. We moved on to a couple of Cochabamba's finest clubs to continue the party, where all of us, boys and girls, had to fend off the attentions of a very pretty but scarily predatory Bolivian girl. Jonny didn't bother trying to fend her off, so had his face mauled for the remainder of the night. He managed to extract himself from her when we were leaving, and in his drunken state has lost her number. He's been trying to decipher her first attempt at writing her number on a different scrap of paper, but so far to no avail.

As for Sucre, if there is a God I don't think he wanted us to go. The morning after the night before I realised I didn't have my bag, and therefore didn't have my phone or purse. I figured I must have left it in the club. I was supposed to be buying the bus tickets in advance to avoid the problem of the week before. Instead, I spent the morning and my last 10Bs trying to find my bag (the club was shut until late that night) and get money out with my emergency credit card (had to call Mum and drag her away from a social to get my PIN, and when I did the card didn't work). I was supposed to be at Jack's for his birthday lunch at 12, so I had to call him and apologise for being late and stressed. That was when he told me that he had my bag. I suppose I should have guessed; he does love carrying my 'man-bag'. He'd picked it up from the cloakroom for me and had got out of the taxi with it still over his shoulder, and had assumed I knew he had it. Jack's birthday lunch was therefore less stressful. His family is really rather posh, and their house is amazing. Lunch was exquisite. I'm sure they selected Jack specifically from the potential volunteers on the basis of his public school background, public-school good looks and his public-school interpretation of 'smart casual' to be v-neck jumper, pin-stripe shirt, chinos and loafers. Fortunately for him they didn't follow the Bolivian custom of pushing the face of the birthday boy into the (very gooey chocolate) birthday cake. I think I might export the tradition back to England.

With my bag I made it to the bus station early in the afternoon and bought seven bus tickets. I'd managed to persuade Gail, Jonny and Alexis to come along with Jack, Amy, Kevan and I this time. We agreed to meet at the bus station at 7.40 for the 8pm bus. Most of us made it there for ten-to, by which time a lady from the bus company ran over to us and screamed that the bus was leaving and we had to run to get it. Jack hadn't arrived yet. Gail, Amy and Kevan went to find the bus whilst the rest of us waited anxiously for Jack. At 8 he came, and we ran with the lady to find the bus. Gail, Amy and Kevan were nowhere to be seen because the silly woman had pointed the wrong way, so I sent her to look for them. At 5 past 8 all seven of us were chasing after the bus as it drove out of the terminal. Luckily it stopped for us, much to the annoyance of the other passengers.

It wasn't the best of journeys, but we got to Sucre at about 6 in the morning, and found a lovely hostel recommended to us by two Germans Jack and I had met in Potosí. The receptionist was unbelievably helpful, bringing us freshly squeezed orange juice, clean towels, and apologising for absolutely nothing. We had a bit of a nap before heading out to see supposedly the most beautiful town in Bolivia. It is stunning: every building is white and looks freshly painted, and all are in the classic colonial style. The plazas, framed by grand old buildings, are very pretty. It took us about two hours to have breakfast though (not least because the waitresses kept getting our orders wrong), so by the time we'd wandered round La Casa de la Libertad, everything else had closed. La Casa de la Libertad was worth the visit though, displaying in a beautiful mansion plenty of paintings and artefacts from Bolvia's history - and, obviously, bemoaning the loss of it's coastline in the war with Chile, and of various other territories to various other countries. The Bolivian football team seems to be faring similarly in the Copa America, incidentally.

Faced with two hours and no museums or churches to take pictures of before we went to see the dinosaur tracks, we went to the park and pretended to be eight years old. We had a ride on the kiddies' quad bikes and played on the swings and the slides. Gail scared herself and us getting stuck in a compromising position on the (terrifyingly high) climbing frame, and Jonny broke Amy's belt and bruised his bum attempting the rip-wire. We later took the "dino-truck" (which may as well be called the "gringo truck") to the park outside Sucre which exhibited some pretty impressive life-size recreations of different dinosaurs. It made me want to find my dinosaur books from my childhood. The dinosaur footprints themselves though were rather disappointing. For a start, we could only look at them from a great distance. They could have been anything. Second, they ran up a near vertical wall. The official explanation runs that tectonic activity has pushed up that particular bit of earth from an originally flat orientation. Third, they were coincidentally located right next to a cement factory. Gail concluded that the workers from said factory got bored one day and decided to cover part of the cliff in concrete, don some dinosaur-foot-shaped shoes and climb the cliff. I prefer this explanation.

Somewhat disillusioned, we returned to Sucre and had a beer in a bar to watch the Bolivia-Venezuela game, which Bolivia of course lost, before hitting a restaurant. Jack offered to go to the bus terminal to get tickets for the journey back on Sunday night. He came back with the news that all of the buses were full. We'd struggled to get to Sucre, now we couldn't leave the damned place. Gail and Amy were quite excited by the prospect of an extra day off work, but Alexis had to get back to return to Puerto, and Kevan didn't want to risk his chances of wangling time off to go to Salar the following weekend. Jonny, Alexis and Gail went to investigate flight options and clubbing options whilst the rest of us went to get some overdue sleep. Fortunately (or not for Gail and Amy), Jack's suspicion that there may be more buses to choose from the next morning proved correct, and going to the bus terminal at some ridiculously early hour on Sunday paid off: we found spaces to get back. We had another leisurely breakfast and took a taxi to a market town two hours outside Sucre. Yep, just one taxi, for seven of us. It took a bit of persuading, but we convinced a taxi driver that we could evade the police check and put two of us in the boot under our coats and jumpers rather than forking out for two cars. Kevan and Amy had an uncomfortable journey. The market was fun. We bought yet more alpaca items of clothing. I even bought some peasant sandals made of old car tyres for about 50p. They're really uncomfortable. Alexis bought a plastic bag of meat and corn for 3.50Bs (about 20p), and unsurprisingly found that he'd purchased a bag of offal. It looked disgusting. He ate it anyway, despite Jonny telling him it was a bit gross to eat an anus.

Our nice taxi man waited two hours to take us back to Sucre (I guess 180Bs meant pay day for him), and we managed an incredibly greasy Chinese (almost a national cuisine) before getting the bus home. How the bus can have been so bumpy when we were on a surfaced road I don't know. It was a struggle to stay on the seats, and Gail wished she was wearing a sports bra. Amy and I had taken travel sickness pills, which were very potent and meant we were semi-conscious even when awake, so I slept a fair bit. Though I did hear Kevan getting a bit miffed about the local approach to leaving babies behind when they get off to go to the toilet. "There's babies strewn all over the floor!" It was true. Ah, Bolivia.