Sucre

Hola, ¿que tal? from Sucre, Bolivia.

Here´s a picture from our first stop in Bolivia - Tupiza. This is the Puerto del Diablo, or the Devil´s Gate, which is a vertical wall of sandstone jutting up off the floor of the desert with an opening in the middle:




And a shot looking out over the vineyards outside of Tarija - it is the beginning of winter, so everything is brown:



We flew into Sucre early last week after spending six days in Tarija because of the bus strike. The long-distance bus companies do not want to have to pay taxes for the highways, so they aren´t going. Judging from the state of the roads here, either the bus companies are justified in not wanting to support such a transportation system, or on the other hand, they need to start paying up in a bad way.

We are in the former capitol of Bolivia, which is nestled on the side of a (relatively) small mountain range in the middle of the country. Most of the government functions have since moved to La Paz, but the supreme court of the country convenes here. There is also a university here giving the city an energetic vibe.

Sucre has a great market - one of the things that Melanie and I love to do is walk around each city´s market. For anyone who hasn´t wandered around a Latin American market before, they are an assault on the senses. There is the pleasant smell and bright colors of vegetables and herbs, and the earthy, almost rotten smell and gory sight of meat (from complete carcasses to guts) hanging on hooks, and also the smells and sounds of people cooking up meals from ingredients fresh from the neighboring stalls. The kids rushing up to you trying to sell you trinkets and the vendors yelling at you to have a look at their oranges completes the experience.

In Bolivia, you can get just about any type of potato you could ever imagine:

And the women (they are almost exclusively women) selling herbs are members of the local indigenous tribe:



One of the handcrafts that the local indigenous people have been making for centuries is woven tapestries and cloths. You can tell one tribe from another by the different style and colors of the woven clothing they wear. There is a museum in Sucre dedicated to preserving these arts and employs locals to weave on the premesis:

Outside of Sucre is the world´s largest site of dinosaur tracks in the world, which are located in a limestone quarry:

This picture shows the side of a cliff that is about 250 feet high. Here´s me for scale on some of the tracks:

Maybe the tracks were made by this creature:

(Why didn´t we have sweet slides like this when I was growing up???)

Some of the colonial architecture in Sucre:

A two and a half hour cab ride from Sucre is the mining town of Potosi. This used to be the richest city in South America because of the silver found in the surrounding hills. The mountain on whose base the city sits looks like it has been shaved by the miners:

Some of the churches also have very ornate carving around their entrances, probably paid for with silver money:



And, last but not least, some things just don´t translate: