Sucre!

We pulled into Sucre around 6am, and my initial reaction was... oh dear. However, being on a smelly bus from hell does warp your preception, as does seeing a deserted city at 6am on a Sunday from a bus station. I´m happy to say my first impressions were wrong.

We were all tired and a little cranky and found a hostel quick. It was basic, and our room smelled like moldy chicken soup, but we changed to join the others at a nicer hostel the next day. At that point I was worried I´d only remember Bolivia as being a series of bad smells...

Sucre turned out to be a lovely place to relax for a few days and I really did very little here other than aimlessly wonder and chill. Me and Bethany did however spend alot of time in the Market, which, maybe sadly, was one of my favourite things about Sucre! I´ve never seen so much fresh fruit and Veg in my life. Somebody warned me in Beunos Aires, that if I thought the lack of fruit and veg there was bad (they only eat steak remember) then I´d really struggle later in my trip, that it only got worse. I´m happy to say that was a lie.

Another wonderful thing about Poor Bolivia, is that everything is very cheap. Dinner out in a nice resturaunt costs about 6euro, often including drink. Taxi´s are about 50cent, and haggling is done everywhere here. Sometimes though, you really have to stop yourself from arguing when you realise that 10bolivianos is really only a euro...

Like I said, I got a little lazy in Sucre, and after wonderful Timo´s departure, five girls set off to get pedicures and massages... Backpacker style. One thing I´ve noticed about Bolivians, is that customer service isn´t really a high priority... When we walked into the Salon, faces dropped, they had to work. People move slowly, and in resturaunts here it can be particularly frustrating, food is brought one plate at a time, long pauses between each. Its normal to wait ten minutes for the bill. Well, it was the same in the Salon, only a little more scary, because of their lack of enthusiasm can lead to careless filing or clipping... ouch. Still, I can´t complain, I got lucky and my Pedicurist was lovely, although the other girls looked a little scared. The massage was also interesting, a dirty robe was given to me, and it was a little male Bolivian Massus, but I´m glad to say he had the same intimidated attitude towards Western women as many men in Sucre, I´m sure if I´d been in Chile it may have been a different experience!

After 3 days in Sucre and one interesting night of Salsa, we all headed to the Capital on Bolivia, the highest Capital city in the world, La Paz. We´d managed to find a decent bus company. It was no Super Carma, and they did torture us with the amazing Steven Segal in ´Pistol Whipped´, but we made it!