I Predict a Riot

La Paz
After crossing the border, we stopped for lunch in Copacabana (not the famous one) and given free rein to go anywhere to eat, everyone ended up in the same place. La Paz is high up-the highest capital city in the world, although there are currently strikes and demonstrations aimed at making Sucre the capital-it's currently the judicial capital.



La Paz was a winner, more Quito than Lima and spirits seem rejuvenated. I'm really liking Christian-he seems very honest and straightforward. I was the only bloke not to go mountain biking down death road; it's narrow, gravelly, descends over 3,000m and has massive drops off the edge. Given the ease with which I generate downhill speed, I felt it would be foolish for me to go-death road is aptly named as a lot of people have gone over the edge.

So I got to spend the day with the girls-all but one of them had stayed back. We half filled a microbus as we headed out of town to the Valley of the Moon. On the way we passed a large area of red rock formations that looked like Aussie termite hills, as densely packed as stalagmytes. The valley itself is an area of hard to photograph formations with a large canyon. We were a bit short on explanation, but it looked more like mud than rock, which had been eroded and shaped by the wind and rain. There were sedimentary layers throughout the pillars of mud; the pebbles and gravel looking like they had come from a river, tho they may have been glacial.




After a wholefood lunch, we spent half an hour in the Coca museum. Coca is a big deal here and in Peru: people chew the leaves, coca cola use the leaves and the tea is everywhere. However, I think it may be the use of coca leaves to make Cocaine that renders this La Paz most visited museum. There's not a lot to it in truth-lots of photos and a plenty of text. We were given a folder with an English translation: several people noticed the passage on the personality of a drug addict was like a character sketch of one of the group.

We had a good potter round the hilly historic centre, which like so many other S Am towns and cities was pretty without having any major highlights.



La Paz has a Witches market full of odd things, loads of love potions and is one of the places you can buy a Llama foetus



bury one under your house for good luck.

After dinner we popped into the Hard Rock Café for a swift one. As they were serving monstrous 7 year reserve Havana Clubs for 20 Bolivianos (about £1.25), the night turned very messy indeed. With a 7 hour bus ride to Cochabamba the next day, it didn't seem to matter.

I think my iPod may be dying a slow death-on the way into Lima it made horrid grinding noises and died when I tried to skip forward. I rebooted and got a sad face and a web address. It came back to life, but it's just done the same again. Possibily its the altitude. Maybe it's not such a slow death. iPod death has been a recurring fear-I've 6 and a bit weeks and a lot of buses to go.

Cochabamba
I was very excited by the idea of visiting and photographing the biggest Jesus in the world. Completed a decade ago, it's 4 cm bigger than Rio's. For me that a good way of saying there's not much here and that's pretty fair. Our time in Cochabamba was completed by another nice square, another small museum complete with mummies, a bit of 10 pin bowling and a very stylistically confused house built in the 1920s for $10M. That's what you can do in a desperately poor country if you get the tin mining rights. It would be almost impossible to spend an equivalent amount today, especially as it wasn't very big. Due to the altitude and his health, Mr Tin never lived in it, while his descendants now live in Switzerland. The mines were nationalised in the 50s,

This was the daddy of Cochabamba tho.




That's 2 big Jesus and a big Mary down, at least 1 big Jesus to go.

Sucre
We'd heard bad things about the night bus to Sucre. This included reports of people pissing in the aisle-probably apocryphal, but discouraging nonetheless. So we all paid less than £30 extra to fly. Turns out that it was just as well we flew, otherwise we'd have missed out on all the fun.

Flying meant losing a day in Cochabamba (so no great loss) and gaining a good half day in Sucre. Plan quickly formed to take it easy on day 1, see Sucre's sights day 2 and get out of town for some horse trekking on the last day.

Getting into the chilling mode, Lorna and I had lunch looking over Sucre.



We spent a while wading through her photos, the lonely planet and my blog before heading back down into town. We paused to look in the Iglesia de la Mercad; Sucre's churches must be in a sorry state of repair as the LP described the run down interior as the pick. The view from the bell tower was fab. As well as the town, we saw plenty of puffs of smoke as protestors let off firecrackers. The past year has been spent redrafting the Bolivian constitution. The publication of the proposals has been highjacked by those wishing to see Sucre as the country's capital once more. I like Sucre, but it is not a capital city-it does currently share the title with La Paz, but La Paz has both the government and the feel of a capital.

We needed to find a card and present for the group to give Catherine, whose birthday it was. It was decided a bottle of vodka would do the trick. As we walked into the supermarket, I noticed the procession of protestors walking down towards us. I figured that by the time we were out of the shop, it'd make a good photo. As we were paying the cashier was looking away and wiping her eyes-I hadn't thought I smelt that bad. A chap opened the door barely enough for us to squeeze out the shop, which seemed odd as it would have been easier if we'd done it ourselves. About 10 strides later, as my eyes streamed, nose stung and throat burned it became apparent that the police had fired tear gas. So we went to sit in the supermarket. The locals were.

Fairly soon we were restless and vinegar was being passed round-it counteracts the tear gas apparently. After 10 mins or so, we headed out. We still needed a card and knew where to go as the shop had earlier been closed for lunch. Although this meant heading toward where the tear gas had come from, we thought it'd be OK.

I stopped to check the map and noticed the pile of burning tyres



then the riot police ran past



at this point it occurred to us that if Catherine had vodka then she probably wouldn't miss a birthday card. Since the main square and riot epicentre lay between us and our hotel, we had to find a route round the back. The route kept changing as burning tyres, tear gas or crowds of running people dissuaded us going down the planned road. At one point I was at a crossroads, planning another diversion when 3 people ran up with tyres and got ready to light them. Eventually we were looking down the block with our hotel on; it was less than a minute away, but the street was filled with protestors, stale tear gas and had a line of riot police across it.

So we went to the pub. We're both British after all. We got a drink and watched it unfurl on TV, so we only saw footage of the rubber bullets.

Lorna called the hotel to tell them we were OK and found out everyone was there except for Richard and Katie. Christian told Lorna we should stay put and he'd come and get us when it was safe. I wanted to go and look for Richard and Katie, but admitted it was pointless and they were almost certainly doing the same thing as us. I settled for looking up and down the street every so often, expecting my Jedi powers to make me look at a time I would see them. I didn't.

When we finished our wine, we were restless so I went and checked the streets. There were fewer people and only one set of burning tyres between us and the hotel, so we decided not to wait for Christian and just walked back. We recognised all the figures on the balcony watching and photographing the action. Someone should have been selling popcorn.

The smell of the tyres lingered well into the next day, but no one riots at the weekend (no lectures), so we got on with Sucre as planned.

First up was the Casa de la Libertad, where you can see the declaration of independence, overlooked by Simon Bolivar



He also had a big wooden head

PHOTO 7249, which I´ll need to load later as this PC is pants

The Casa isn't too big and is nicely laid out, but as a museum of Bolivian history it has a lot of room for improvement. Even in Spanish, there's next to no information, so a lot of the exhibits leave you rather nonplussed.

Interestingly, Bolivia had a woman president (in 1979) before it had an indigenous one (60% of the population is indigenous). We also noticed it took a very long time before the Bolivians trusted the presidency to a man without facial hair, although his predecessor had enough for 3 men.

One of the big things in these parts are the dinosaur footprints. They were found in a cement mine type place (that sounds wrong) out of town. So we bravely boarded the DinoTruck to get there



It was a bumpy old ride up to DinoLand (I spent the rest of the day giving everything a DinoPrefix). When we got there, it's fair to say it wasn't quite what we expected. I'm not sure the last thing I visited in South America that had clearly had so much money spent on it. They had over 30 life size models of dinosaurs-the Titanosaur (the largest thing ever to walk the earth) was ginormous. Here's the T Rex



everybody loves a good T Rex. All of this was fun, cheesey padding for the tracks. When I saw the tracks were 400m away, on a vertical wall, across a quarry where trucks were running up and down, you'd probably think it was a letdown. Somehow it wasn't. The vertical wall used to be ground by a lake-it's moved due to techtonics. I wish I'd asked what altitude it had come from-I can't imagine there being enough oxygen at this height for such big creatures. You could see lines of tracks quite clearly with the naked eye and the fixed binoculars and camera zoom gave some real detail



I was impressed.

A very long lunch (there's really no such thing as a quick bite), a spin round the University museum and a final abortive attempt to get in the cathedral completed our Sucran tour. Sweet.

Let's face it, everyone's gonna remember Sucre for the tear gas.

Due to a shortage of horses, Sunday's horse trekking morphed into a visit to the market in Tarabuco. It wasn't hugely special, but made a good change of scene for the 4 of us, Iz and Catherine. In any case, Laura found an interesting local hat