4/27/10: Sucre, Bolivia
For the last three days, we had been planning on taking the Dino Truck out to see the dinosaur tracks just outside of Sucre. But then we thought about it some more, and the thing is – neither of us is that interested in dinosaurs. For me, I think this stems from my disillusionment of the scientific community in general and dinosaurs specifically when I found out that Brontosauruses (Brontosauri?) don’t really exist. I don’t know how someone could put one dinosaur’s head on a different dinosaur’s body and create an entirely new species that never existed and have this go undiscovered for years! Years! Have you not seen the eighteen Land Before Time movies? Well, I hate to break it to you, but Littlefoot wasn’t real!
You might be able to guess from that last paragraph that we didn’t go see the dinosaur tracks. I think this made us both feel a little bit guilty about “not doing anything,” though probably Kevin to a greater extent than me. Because honestly, I consider a day spent walking around and shopping and eating ice cream quite a full and satisfying day. And a cultural experience at that – because how is eating a banana split in Bolivia not a cultural experience?
My wafer is a harmonica, in case you can't tell what's going on in this picture.
Anyway, even though we never saw the tracks themselves, I’m reassured that they exist by all the pictures we looked at when we were trying to decide whether or not to go see the dinosaur tracks. So I’m happy. What we did do today (besides eating ice cream and ruining my appetite for dinner) was spend most of the day walking around Sucre, looking for matching leg warmers for my new hat and gloves and just wasting time in general until our 7pm bus to La Paz.
Now this is where the excitement heightens! Remember how we’ve been trying to book fully-reclining cama seats on our last few overnight trips? The first time we decided to upgrade to cama it turned out that we were 20 pesos short, and there weren’t any ATMs near the bus station so we had to go semi-cama instead. The second time we tried to book cama, the cama seats were all sold out so we booked semi-cama instead. And even though we had left the land of good buses (Argentina) and were now in the land of crappy buses (Bolivia), I was still determined to have one – just one! – experience of riding cama on an overnight bus. So of course we decided to get cama seats for our overnight to La Paz. The guy at our hostel recommended a good agency to book our tickets through. (Normally we book all of our tickets at the bus station in order to get the best price, but the bus station was a bit far away, and the hostel guy assured us that the agency would only charge 10 Bolivianos commission per ticket.) So we booked our tickets for 150 Bolivianos (roughly 21 USD), and hoped that the bus would live up to our dreams. Well, ok, my dreams.
This is what you would call “exceeds expectations.”
I pulled the curtain down so I wouldn't have to look at Kevin on the bus ride.
The leather seats were super comfortable, and I was thrilled to be on our first cama ride. I didn’t even mind that there was no toilet on the bus and happily paid one Boliviano to use the Potosi bus station toilet during our 10pm stop. We both fell asleep shortly thereafter, expecting to wake up the next morning at 7am, fully refreshed and in La Paz.
But I should have known that it wasn’t meant to be. Because the cama curse still exists in full force.
TO BE CONTINUED… (dun dun dun!)
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Puzzles for Postcards
Hidden Sports (Find one sport hidden forward or backward in each of the three sentences, must be at least five letters long)
Carl was born in Jamaica and raised in Vietnam, but he’s in Netherlands right now for work.
Jeremy Shockey thought long and hard about being a professional golfer before his NFL days.
Lincoln may have been known for his top hat, but even Boflex would like to sell Abe’s abs.
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Picture of the Day: Bye, Sucre.
