Our last post finished with us navigating our way through the narrow streets of Potosi in the random taxi we picked up in Sucre. We eventually found our hostel and checked in to a reasonable looking room with a private bathroom. We decided to go out quickly to explore the town however Jacqueline was feeling ill and stayed back for a nap whilst Alex, Esmee, Katinka and I went out. We quickly found the central plaza (10 de Noviembre) and although it was smaller than the one in Sucre, they certainly hadn’t skimped on the Christmas decorations as there were trees and fake snowmen, candles, a model Father Christmas and thousands of lights. We then explored the central market which was surprisingly large but half closed. In our attempts to escape the meat smell we walked down some stairs and found a section selling everything from dried pasta to electronics.
One of the beautiful buildings surrounding Plaza 25 de Mayo, Sucre
Hi Alex here, taking over again to tell you about our stop in Sucre.
Sucre is the official capital of Bolivia, although the Government is based in La Paz and it is the much larger of the two. Sucre is a lovely city though, a small university town with lots of old colonial architecture and beautiful countryside all around.
From La Paz we’d decided to catch a plane to Sucre, this was a 35 minute flight as opposed to a 12 hour bus and only cost us £50 so not too difficult a decision! We arrived to a much more temperate climate and a lower, more manageable altitude. We were met by Jorge, the owner of the place we’d be staying in for the next few nights. We found the room through Esmee, whose friend had stayed with a friend of Jorge’s previously. Don Jorge’s Rooftop Rooms has a big roof terrace with a great view over the city and had space for all five of us.
It’s been a month since our last post thanks to having very little internet or time while on the road. We have however been writing as we travel so we have loads to publish. We’re currently sitting in Ushuaia, the most southerly city in the world while we await our Antarctica trip! We have 7 days so we’ll be using some of that time to publish a couple more posts and get more ready behind the scenes!
Anyway we left the story a month ago on a bus from Copacabana (the original one) in Bolivia to the city of La Paz. After a long but fairly comfortable journey we wound down the mountain towards the centre of the highest de facto capital city in the world!
View from the cable cars, La Paz
On arrival by bus in La Paz, the biggest city in Bolivia, we walked to our hostel. Luckily it was only 5 minutes away in an area described as less than salubrious. Bus stations and the areas around them can often be a little sketchy and since we were arriving at 10:30pm I had a look at my map before we got off the bus and memorised the route. My efforts paid off as 5 minutes later we rounded a corner and found our hostel. We need not have worried as the area actually seemed to be fairly pleasant! We’d booked the Dutch girls into the main hostel where only dorms were available and ourselves into the hostel’s B&B 30 seconds up the road. Since both places were effectively part of the same hostel we could all use the facilities of both with the exception of breakfast. The hostel was called Adventure Brew and they owned their own microbrewery, one of the perks of the hostel was a free beer every night so, despite the late hour, we headed straight to get our beers from the bar. Within 10 minutes in the bar we’d struck up conversation with an Aussie, a couple of Brits and a rather strange guy from Denmark. All seemed to be travelling nearly indefinitely, and most had spent over a month in La Paz but had not done much more than we were planning to in a few short days. We ended up staying up until the bar closed, chatting and playing table tennis/table football.
This is a slightly difficult post to write because Peru is the first country that we visited on this trip where we had been before. As a result we had some preconceptions and naturally having had an amazing honeymoon there nearly 4 years earlier the country had something to live up to. On top of this as luck would have it one or other of us was ill for more than half of the time that we were in Peru which took a little bit of the shine off it, and didn’t let us enjoy everything quite as fully as we’d have liked. Finally, since we’d seen the top sights of Peru before we tried to skip some of them and go to places where we hadn’t previously been.
With all that said you can probably guess where this is going, so please bear the above in mind when you read the following thoughts. Continue reading “Thoughts on Peru”
