Marc & Nora ROUND THE WORLD 2005/2006 - Join us!

After a few nights in Sucre we organised a private car to take Nora, Alistair, Tara and myself to Sucre which is about 2 hours away by road.

What a beautiful city! Ignore what the Lonely planet may tell you about the capital of Bolivia being La Paz...this is wrong. The capital of Bolivia is in fact Sucre. The government resides in La Paz but the seat of the Supreme Court is in Sucre and this is in fact what determines the capital city.

The city itself is like a small mediterranean town with palm tree lined plazas surrounded by beautiful spanish colonial architecture. What also impressed us was the fact how clean the city is - it generally seems that Bolivians like to keep their cities clean. Wherever you look you will always see somebody sweeping or washing the floor and the amount of gardeners we have seen in Sucre is crazy - they are to be found on every single corner!

The climate was almost mediterranean too with temperatures into the 20s and after -25deg c of just a few days ago it was quite a shock to the system. We had no special plans for Sucre and we were just content with wandering and exploring the streets and markets. Overlooking the city itself is the beautiful hilltop view point which can be best enjoyed at sunset with a cocktail at Cafe Mirador....what a spot!

One excursion from Sucre which we did make was a trip out to the dinosaur footprints of Cal Orko. This is in fact the worlds largest collection of dinosaur footprints with more than 5000 from over 150 different types of dinosaur. The footprints are actually visible on an almost vertical 30000 square metre wall of a cement works quary. The guided visit itself wasn`t that great and the most accessable footprints are in pretty bad shape due to the errosion of the rock face but with a little imagination it is quite unbelievable to think that you are looking at actual dinosaur footprints...some of which are huge! The delicate state of the footprints didn`t trouble one clearly mad tourist from Montreal who was basically smashing her feet into the crumbling footprints so that she could get a photo with a comparison of human/dinosaur foot size!!

After a nice few realaxing days in Sucre we packed our rucksacks, said our goodbyes to Alistair and Tara and took our flight from Sucre to La Paz.