¡Libertad!
Hostelling International Sucre are to be commended for being one of the relatively rare breed of hostel that takes into account its guest's likely behaviours when setting its rules on check-out. Noon is a much more sensible check-out time than 9:30am or some of the other things I have been quoted by hostels down the years. Means you can lie in until 10:30 or 11 if you've been out, and still get out of the room in time. So I was feeling in a remarkably cheery mood as I popped my bags into storage at the hostel for the afternoon and went into the city for a last bit of exploring before my bus out of town. First stop was the Mercado Central (Central Market) where I again sampled the remarkably cheap and filling local food, and then I raided the fresh juice bars, where I got a very nice freshly-squeezed orange and pineapple juice for about 60p. That's one thing I will really miss about Bolivia - the wide availability of cheap, fresh fruit juices! The absolute antithesis of Chile, where anything that looks like juice in a supermarket is more like very sugary squash...
Having refuelled myself for the day, and banished any lingering demons from the previous night's beer intake, I headed over to the main Plaza, intending to go to the Casa de la Libertad (Liberty House museum), only to find that it was closed over lunch, so I popped back to my favourite internet cafe, where I was surprised to meet Jenny and Nadia, the two Irish girls from my unintended Karaoke-fuelled evening a couple of nights previously - I'd thought they had left town, but no, they were still there, held by the gravitational pull of large quantities of alcohol. At any rate, having caught up quickly with them, I headed back to my intended destination and had a look around the site of the signing of Bolivia's Declaration of Independence in 1825. The building itself was originally part of the Jesuit University, parts of it having been built over 400 years ago. It's beautifully whitewashed, like almost all public buildings in Sucre, such that on a sunny day the reflected light within the courtyards is quite dazzling. It's all signed in Spanish with nothing in English, but I was gratified to find that I could understand the majority of what was happening anyway. One stereotype that held up to a large extent was quite how many of the numerous Presidential portraits in the Hall of the Senate had captions beginning "General...". Quite a difference from the current incumbent, Evo, references to whom appear in graffiti all over Bolivia, the majority positive but a sizeable smattering of negative stuff as well. There was also an interesting temporary exhibit on the War of the Pacific, the struggle in the late 19th Century which saw Bolivia lose its only coastal territories to Chile, and about which the Bolivians are, not terribly surprisingly, really rather bitter. It still gets mentions in newspaper comments on relations between the countries, and pretty much every Bolivian Presidential candidate vows to work towards the return of El Litoral. Bolivia even still maintains the staff of a navy, despite not having a coastline (if you don't include the shores of Lake Titicaca)!
Fortified by a revised knowledge of Bolivian history, I finished the afternoon by finally getting the required padded envelope, finding the post office and sending hom the backups of my photo DVDs from the trip thus far. I then headed back to the hostel, walking in the end because I couldn't find where the bloody micro-buses were supposed to go from, and thus getting to really appreciate how much it had been worth the 5 Bs it cost me each time I got a cab back in the middle of the night! There was a fair bit of steepness involved. I then reclaimed my bags and waddled back down to the bus station, where I checked my main pack in and went in search of some snackage - I had a premonition that food on even a cama service in Bolivia would be either poor or non-existent (I was right). Waiting around by the bus, I got chatting briefly with a couple of Americans, Scott and Jesse, but once on the bus they were a fair bit farther back so we weren't able to talk any more. We were "treated" to a series of very loud (dubbed in Spanish) films, neither of which I can actually remember, and I struggled as ever for sleep. This wasn't helped much by the "rest stop" we made at 2am, to survive which I ended up getting a freshly-made fried-egg-and-chip sandwich from a little old lady running a stand in the middle of the night at the point various of the buses crossed paths between Sucre and La Paz. What a job...
Having refuelled myself for the day, and banished any lingering demons from the previous night's beer intake, I headed over to the main Plaza, intending to go to the Casa de la Libertad (Liberty House museum), only to find that it was closed over lunch, so I popped back to my favourite internet cafe, where I was surprised to meet Jenny and Nadia, the two Irish girls from my unintended Karaoke-fuelled evening a couple of nights previously - I'd thought they had left town, but no, they were still there, held by the gravitational pull of large quantities of alcohol. At any rate, having caught up quickly with them, I headed back to my intended destination and had a look around the site of the signing of Bolivia's Declaration of Independence in 1825. The building itself was originally part of the Jesuit University, parts of it having been built over 400 years ago. It's beautifully whitewashed, like almost all public buildings in Sucre, such that on a sunny day the reflected light within the courtyards is quite dazzling. It's all signed in Spanish with nothing in English, but I was gratified to find that I could understand the majority of what was happening anyway. One stereotype that held up to a large extent was quite how many of the numerous Presidential portraits in the Hall of the Senate had captions beginning "General...". Quite a difference from the current incumbent, Evo, references to whom appear in graffiti all over Bolivia, the majority positive but a sizeable smattering of negative stuff as well. There was also an interesting temporary exhibit on the War of the Pacific, the struggle in the late 19th Century which saw Bolivia lose its only coastal territories to Chile, and about which the Bolivians are, not terribly surprisingly, really rather bitter. It still gets mentions in newspaper comments on relations between the countries, and pretty much every Bolivian Presidential candidate vows to work towards the return of El Litoral. Bolivia even still maintains the staff of a navy, despite not having a coastline (if you don't include the shores of Lake Titicaca)!
Fortified by a revised knowledge of Bolivian history, I finished the afternoon by finally getting the required padded envelope, finding the post office and sending hom the backups of my photo DVDs from the trip thus far. I then headed back to the hostel, walking in the end because I couldn't find where the bloody micro-buses were supposed to go from, and thus getting to really appreciate how much it had been worth the 5 Bs it cost me each time I got a cab back in the middle of the night! There was a fair bit of steepness involved. I then reclaimed my bags and waddled back down to the bus station, where I checked my main pack in and went in search of some snackage - I had a premonition that food on even a cama service in Bolivia would be either poor or non-existent (I was right). Waiting around by the bus, I got chatting briefly with a couple of Americans, Scott and Jesse, but once on the bus they were a fair bit farther back so we weren't able to talk any more. We were "treated" to a series of very loud (dubbed in Spanish) films, neither of which I can actually remember, and I struggled as ever for sleep. This wasn't helped much by the "rest stop" we made at 2am, to survive which I ended up getting a freshly-made fried-egg-and-chip sandwich from a little old lady running a stand in the middle of the night at the point various of the buses crossed paths between Sucre and La Paz. What a job...
posted by Pat at 11:51 pm
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