Sucre day 2 - 24 July

MONDAY 24th Sucre

A leisurely start to the day for a change.

After breakfast we walked seven blocks, the last two up a quite steep hill to a church that had a large square which afforded a great view over Sucre, the white city.

100m from here was a textile museum.  In general we aren't museum goers but Lindsey likes textiles so we gave it a go and once again we were pleasantly surprised at how interesting this one was.  It helped that we were each given an English guide book that translated all the descriptive panels.

The Andean people do some amazingly intricate weaving with very rudimentary tools.

Back down the hill we walked to visit the market.

I bought a Saltenas as I walked in and then we went to the Juice stalls.  Lindsey got talking to a young woman from Georgia (USA) who is on a scholarship in Santiago (Chile) who was visiting Sucre for a holiday.  She was eating the most delicious looking tower of fruit salad garnished with cream and caramel sauce and making use of her excellent Spanish we ordered one to share instead of getting the juice we first intended to buy.  It was delicious and the young woman was very interesting to talk to.

Once that was devoured we went upstairs to find a local specialty, sopa de mani, peanut soup.  The soups we've had on this trip have all been superb and this one was pretty good too.  We were ushered to a tiny table set for four and just after we received our soup two locals sat down with us to have the same soup.

They both prayed over their soup, giving thanks, before they ate.  We then tried to have some sort of conversation which was largely unsuccessful.  We were able to tell them where we were from and then Lindsey drew a wee map on a napkin to show the man that we had travelled from Lima via various places to here.  He was quite taken with all this and then showed his wife recounting our travels to her in Spanish.

After lunch we set out to find the two geocaches in Sucre.

The first one was in Parque Bolivar.  Quite a large park with an enclosed dinosaur themed park for children and a ghastly orange (Eiffel) tower in the middle of the main park.

A quick find and then a 1.5 km walk to the main cemetery.  The cemetery is actually listed as a tourist attraction because of its park like settings.  It is well manicured.  Students come to sit on park benches here to read.  There are some huge mausoleums just inside the entranceway and then further on there are graves stacked one on top of the other above ground in long rows.  They go about eight or ten high.  We discovered later that they are only allowed to reside here for three years.  They are then cremated free of charge to make room for new arrivals.  If you want the ashes which you have to pay for there is no guarantee that someone else's ashes won't be mixed up with your loved ones.  Nobody gets cremated straight up as it is too expensive for them.

Cemetery visited.  Cache found and we walked back to the hotel for a siesta.

Dinner just the two of us again.  This time at a restaurant/pub called Florin.  No English speaking staff here tonight.  The attraction was that they advertised themselves as a micro brewery.  They brew four different varieties of beer but unfortunately only one type at a time.  The beer this week was a wheat beer which I don't particularly like.  Luckily they had some more interesting bottled beer brewed in Cochabamba.  So I had a strong beer 7.2% followed by an IPA.  Lindsey enjoyed the wheat beer.  The food was good too.  Lindsey had a moussaka and I had enchiladas. I have no idea where the aubergine came from as we haven't seen any in the markets.

Dining complete and back to the main square for our evening ritual of people watching.  To our surprise there was a group of young men at the base of the central statue practicing their break dancing.  They were really good and entertaining.  Their strength amazed us.  They were doing acrobatics on their hands with their legs flying through the air just like we would see gymnasts doing on a pommel horse at the Olympics.

That allowed an enjoyable hour to go by before returning to the hotel for the night.