Sucre & La Paz

Arriving to Sucre feels like coming from hell to heaven. I guess the Greeks were wrong and the Greek under world of Hades is somehow above heaven not the other way round :) Though Potosi hell at over 4000 meters is also actually under ground - in mines...

We did not expect the positive things by any means. I have been to Bolivia before about five years ago and I did not remember any city that would be close to anything that could appeal to me. I just so a couple but thought it was a representative sample. I was wrong. We arrived after a 3 hour taxi ride to Sucre. We took a taxi because we did not want to risk another hell ride in a bus (nice normal taxi costed us two EUR each - 4 of us in a taxi - I wish taxis cost that much everywhere else in the world). We arrived and we could not believe our eyes. Sucre is a beautiful town with nicely kept houses all painted white, nice green parks, lots of restaurants and nearly perfect climate of around 20 celsius year round. Even though it is at 2600 meters above sea level it felt like heaven. We could not believe it and we were SO happy not to have to freeze at night... Just great - we missed excursions to nearby sights but enjoyed ourselves tremondously.


Good things end though and we took yet another night bus to our last stop in La Paz. In the morning after we arrived we let a taxi driver take us from the bus station to some hotel we did not know anything about (good choice because it was very good quality for the money). Kind of unusal because one should usually not trust such kind of advice. In the city we walked around and honestly apart from markets there is not much to see. Again you can take excursions to some sites or attractions around the city but we did not feel like doing it.

Instead we opted for two things - witches market and a movie theater. On the witches market we bought overselves all sorts of little statues that should make us live long, in happiness, health and have lots of children... The only good luck amulet which we did not buy are the llama fetuses (see on the picture right) which are generally good for your house. We found them a bit to grouse and feared the strict abortion laws in Poland - would they arrest us on the boarder for violating them - do abortion laws include animals? Hopefully they do - is a llama fetus different from a human fetus? Anyway we wondered around the city, enjoyed good food and decided to go to the movies. We ended up in a beautiful modern cinema (kind of multiplex but without a feeling of a shopping center) were we watched a movie entitled "Blindness" - we did not know anything about the movie. We walked out totally shocked - it is like your worst nightmare come true plus shows the worst side of human race. We had hard time putting our act together for at least a day. We went to see one more movie next day partly about Bolivian history but it did not impress us. The only thing we had left was to get back to Cusco - but as we learned later it would not be as easy as we thought...

PS: The sign on the first picture translates to: "Saint Rita - lawyer for impossible cases¨ :)