Sucre - famous for sausages and chocolate....hmm

Jake and Lou had put us onto a place to stay in Sucre (Mama Viki´s) and an excellent Spanish teacher (Berta). We thought it would be a good idea to hang out in Sucre for 3 weeks or so to improve our Español in preparation for the volunteer work we will start soon and it´s probably been the best move we have made so far.

Erin has managed to score a 3 month voluntary position with the Charles Darwin Foundation on the Galapagos Islands, working on project looking at the effects of tourism on the marine reserve there. It will mean a lot of diving to asses diver damage in some of the world´s best dive spots, so she´s feeling pretty lucky right now to have found a position that fits so well. We hope to get more volunteer work in another country for another 3 month stint, perhaps Colombia or Uruguay...but we´re still working on that one.

Sucre is an awesome city. It´s big enough to have lots of good places to eat and markets with fresh fruit and vegies, but small enough to avoid the choking air pollution of La Paz. Sucre also has lots of really green and shadey plazas, including the main plaza in the middle of town which is a world heritage area (a lot of dosh from the silver mines in nearby Potosi must of flowed this way over the years – at the cost of about 8 million lives in those mines during th slavery period alone). The climate is tops aswell…. It´s really warm but is high enough up top avoid the stifling heat and humidity of the tropics. But by far the best thing is the fresh tropical fruit you can get here. All sorts of fresh produce arrives daily from the country around Surce, and the tropical lowlands a little further away – including passionfruit the size of oranges. There is a fantastic central market where you can buy any type of beautiful juice freshly squeezed for about 50 cents. Bliss.

On the other side of things, there is lots of extreme poverty here, with many beggars and orphanages. Some families have to live on as little as NZ $6 a year, which is just hard to believe, as even here where we find things extremely cheap on the New Zealand dollar, it´s still absolutely nothing. It´s definitely pretty hard to get your head around how tough some people have it, in contrast with our having enough money to take a year off and travel around the world...

It´s been great having the time to relax in one place for a while, and cook our own feeds. We have also made some new friends in Berta and Pepe (her husband to be) and Mama Viki and her family. Just about everyone that we have met has gone out of their way to make us feel welcome. It´s pretty hard not to enjoy this place. The Spanish lessons have been taking up most of our time, with 3 hours lessons a day and then lots of study… that and trying to get an extension to our 30 day travel visas (requiring six different trips to the migration office, which has moved three times over the last year or so – so no one knew where it was). With visas in hand we think the next stop is a short trip into the Bolivian Amazon, one of the most bio-diverse places in the world, extended visas in hand!

Pepe, Berta, Mama Viki, Viki, Celia, and some guy with a recedding hairline......


Locals lining up to march for Bolivia´s Indpendence Day......


A fairly typical ´shop´ - this lady selling bamboo heart and oranges.


Th Sucre fire brigade

At the Copa, Copacabana...

There was a bit of confusion on the way to Copacabana when we had to get off the bus and ferry across to the other side of Lake Titicaca. Luckily the bus follwed us across on another barge, because all our bags were still on it. Nevertheless, we got there with all of our kit. We also found a really nice hotel for bugger all (about $5 a night for a room). There we also found a lot more variety in food...no more pizza and pasta for us (well, only for some meals)! Even so, we still had a little trouble. Jake, Lou and Erin decided not to eat the salad one night. Che ate the salad. Che didn´t leave the hotel room for the next 24 hours...Jake, Lou and Erin did. It was a pretty easy lesson to learn.

Apart from the raw swearage being pumped into the lake just in front of our hotel room (hence the photo taken at dusk beow - so you can´t see it bubbling up...hmmm), Copacabana was a really pleasant lakeside resort. Jake and Lou managed to get to the Island of the Sun - the birthplace of the Incas, which, judging from their photos, looked really nice. Unfortunatley we ran out of time to get there as we had to leave Jake and Lou to head to Peru, and head to Sucre ourselves to learn some Español. Hopefully we can get there on the way to Peru in Spetember...


This is just one example of Bolivia´s many very cute dogs. Despite roaming the streets by day, they all seem to have homes come night time and are all really friendly. I could have taken this one home...(after a good wash!).

La Paz - the highest capital city in the world

La Paz is probably in the most unique location of any capital city. Not only is it situated thousands of metres up, in the clouds, it´s also in this really steep valley… so steep that it immediately questions whether Dunedin´s Baldwin Street is really the steepest street in the world. It´s probably likely that the Guinness Book of Records officials didn´t bother heading to Bolivia. Anyhow… apart from the air pollution, it´s a really pleasant capital with quite a bit to see and lots to do. Jake and Lou headed out to the valley of the moon and managed to ride down the aptly named Death Road, while Erin and Che spent turns testing the flush mechanism on the toilets in the hostal. By the end of our few days in La Paz we even managed to scope out a really mean Japanese restaurant, which was a great reward after our acrobatics around the toilet the previous 24 hours. The next day we decided to head to Copocabana, accompanied by our sushi-imposed stretch marks.



The view from our window one morning in La Paz - the snow really freshened things up.



La Paz´s wiring is a New Zealand electrician´s nightmare...

Triping ´round Salar de Uyuni

These four days between Tupiza and Uynui have been some of the best we have had. We (Jake, Lou, Erin and Che) took off in a Toyota landcruiser with our drivers/guides into the hills around Tupiza. Our drivers/guides were top blokes. They were really knowledgeable, friendly and treated us to some pretty mint food, which was an excellent break from the constant supply of pizza and pasta in Tupiza. And they also taught us a couple of words of Quechua, one of Bolivia´s native peoples and languages….dues Paris honkey (thanks) Santos and Alberto!

We managed to see a whole of stuff that blew us away – huge frozen lakes, coloured lakes (red and green), deserts, volcanoes, technicolour hillsides, llamas with ribbons in their ears, pink flamingoes and one big expanse of salt (with a dollop of land in the middle - a former coral reef, now equipped with hundreds of cacti). A little bit different to NZ national parks too, as people subsistence living are still a big part of the parks. One of the side effects of the altitude was that we all had noses that ran constantly, and you got pretty puffed just doing the most basic of tasks….. like going to the toilet. A pretty crazy feeling. In the downtime at night the boys managed to give the girls a couple of lessons in the game of travel battleships that Woody and Gabby gave us when we left London.

It was all so unique that it is pretty hard to choose a highlight...but the salt plains are definitely up there. Jake and I managed to run into a couple of ´little people´ there too. After the salt plains we finished our trip in Uyuni (after we borrowed some gas from another tour guide), and then headed to La Paz.