As sweet as Sucre

11–14 June 2013

Our trip to Sucre was slightly problematic, as we soon learned was to be expected with Amazonas. We left Uyuni bright and early, and while we waited to board our flight, we were entertained by the security guards hugging and kissing and taking photos of the cute, immaculately dressed little Japanese girls also getting on our flight. We ran to get our connecting flight in La Paz, only to find it had been cancelled and we’d automatically been put on the next flight that left two hours later. All without anyone actually telling us. At least this gave us time to walk around the airport, get some sunshine in the pretty gardens outside, talk to the birds and grab a late breakfast.

Chris ran into more trouble with security as we tried to board our flight. They found his personalised Swiss army knife in his carry-on luggage. It had been there for several weeks, but no other security guards had spotted it! We said farewell to his pocket knife and made our way to beautiful Sucre and its tiny but classic airport that looked like it was straight out of 1960s America.

Without doubt, Sucre is Bolivia’s saving grace. Despite the three pigs we saw grazing on the grass in a residential area near the airport, the city seems much more cosmopolitan, cultured, clean, young, orderly and organised. Traffic is less chaotic. Buildings are beautiful, well-maintained, old colonial-style mansions. There are lovely parks, gardens and squares, full of happy families, students, the elderly and birds, and decorated with lots of flowers, topiary bushes, big trees, lush green manicured lawns, fountains, old-style wrought iron lights, fences and benches. Even the stray dogs look exceptionally healthy and happy (the dogs with owners tended to look a little uncomfortable and embarrassed – probably because they were decked out in coats and jumpers!). Sucre feels modern, fresh and energetic. It’s got a nice vibe – and loads of cafes and chocolate shops. It’s also a very walkable city, and we walked everywhere (luckily, considering how much chocolate we (I) consumed).

Chris had booked us into a posh hotel in one of those huge colonial-style buildings, with rooms set around a central courtyard. It was immaculate and ridiculously comfortable, decorated with plush antique furniture and gorgeous indoor/outdoor plants, and had stunning views of the city and surrounding mountains from the rooftop courtyard outside our room. I spent several hours sitting there on a big egg chair, writing, while Chris napped.

The hotel owner met us when we arrived and gave us a private tour of the hotel’s underground museum(!). We later realised this was so they could put some complementary food and booze in our room, in celebration of our honeymoon. They provided an antipasto plate, cheeses, fruit, garlic toast, dried fruit, nuts and champagne. Delicious! In the evenings, the staff even turned down our beds and left chocolate on our pillow. Very decadent!

Our room was huge, clean, bright and classically modern, with a huge bed, tables and chairs, a modern bathroom with loads of hot water and a big shower, an ornate brick and wooden ceiling, a big flat screen TV, a rocking chair, and big windows that overlooked the city on one side of the room and the inner courtyard on the other side of it.

Breakfast was included and while Chris slept in the first morning, I feasted alone on a variety of bread, pancakes, cakes, biscuits, puddings, fruit, yoghurt, cereal, eggs (from the egg bar – cooked on the spot to your liking), juice, tea and infused water. Juan, the waiter, made friends with me and talked with me about the food, hotel, city and photos, and introduced me to Roberta, the egg chef. Chris managed to drag himself out of bed each morning after that, once I told him how good it was.

The food in Sucre was delicious, although sometimes the service was a little lacking. Because we had such big breakfasts, during the days, we mostly just ate chocolate (and cakes, crepes and fruit kebabs with chocolate sauce) and drank hot chocolate and coffee at Para Ti, a gourmet chocolate shop. (I also stocked up with chocolatey goodies for the hotel room.) In the evenings we got room service or tried local restaurants. At Lovet’s bar/restaurant we feasted on Mexican: fajitas, nachos and salad, and drank beer (for Chris) and mojitos with coca leaves (for me). The star restaurant, which soon became our regular haunt, was Florin, where we sampled more Mexican (mojitos, beer, nachos and quesadillas), plus wine, salad, a cheese platter, pad thai and lasagne (not all in the one sitting). We also popped in there for a cuppa and snacks during the day. It had a lovely, slightly alternative vibe, good service – and was no smoking between 6.30 and 9.30pm (generally smoking is permitted everywhere in Bolivia – gross!).

After a couple of false sightseeing starts (everything closes between 12 and 2pmish), we kept ourselves busy for the few days we were there with museums, galleries, parks and shops (although saved our last day for nothing more than walking, shopping, eating and drinking). Several times we ran into some of the people from our Peru tour, who had stopped in Sucre on their way to Brazil in another tour group.

Sucre’s touristy highlight for me was the biology/anatomy museum, which is linked to the local university’s medical school. It was filled with cadavers, body parts, skeletons, diseased tissues, preserved foetuses and organs, and wax work replicas of bodies and the cardiovascular system. It also featured the tools of the medical trade, which were a bit scary and gruesome. There were old scalpels, knives for amputation, blood pressure machines, needles, syringes, x-Ray machines, machines that restart hearts with electricity, and gynaecology and obstetrics tools – all very crude but similar to what is still used. Sadly, the foetuses (ranging from about 10 to 38 weeks' gestation) were from women who had died while pregnant, and most of the bodies and body parts were from dead people who had no relatives or money to bury them, so their bodies had been donated to science. 

A young med student gave us a tour of the museum and talked us through the displays, some of which the students have to make for their assessments. He looked up translations for terms on his phone and I filled him in on a few things he didn’t know (like about the meninges and meningitis). It was all pretty gory and garish, but I loved this museum. It was so interesting and different!

The House of Liberty museum was also pretty interesting. It outlined Bolivia’s political history, fight for independence and wars with its neighbours. Bolivia is pretty bad at war to be honest. It hasn’t won a single war it’s waged, and has actually lost more land in the process!  The museum is full of old flags, weapons, a copy of Bolivia’s Declaration of Independence, and portraits of past presidents (only one woman) and historical figures. It features a chest that contains the bones, swords and shoulder plates of a national heroine. The woman fought for Bolivia’s independence in the 1800s, but was stripped of her status and military rank – despite her senior position in the army and the fact she’d lost her husband and four of her five children in the fighting – all because she was a woman and Indigenous. It seemed the new government didn’t want any challenges from Indigenous people or women. This poor lady died penniless and alone in her 80s, but was posthumously honoured with a senior military rank and is now a national hero.

The dinosaur park was a fun and different excursion too. We jumped on the open-top Dino Bus in the main square, which took us to the park about 20 minutes out of town on the edge of an industrial area. It was a strange but beautiful area, with great views of the country side, the rolling hills scattered with farms and houses, and Sucre in the distance. There must be loads of tectonic plate activity, because there are endless hills and mountains there, pushed up and shifted by all the movement underground.

The story goes that a huge earthquake in the 1800s flattened most of Sucre. The government gave permission for a concrete factory/mine to be built to help rebuild the city (the factory still operates next to the museum). When they were excavating minerals for concrete, they found dinosaur footprints on a cliff face, which they researched and preserved. Some of the cliff face has crumbled over time, revealing different footprints underneath. The footprints were originally made on the bottom of a lake/wetland, but the land had become vertical due to all of the earthquakes and land movement in the area. A little ravine separates the museum from the footprints on the cliff, so we couldn’t get up close to them, but the museum housed moulds of some footprints and actual footprints cut from the land. 

Our tour included a CGI movie about the dinosaurs (their development, daily lives and eventual demise) and a guided tour of the museum complex. The complex features several buildings that house the moulds, models of dinosaur skeletons, some footprints and other random dinosaur paraphernalia. It also has replicas of gardens/landscapes in which the dinosaurs would have lived – with life-size animal models; pieces of land and rock with dinosaur footprints on them; and a play park for kids where you can stick your head in a dinosaur’s mouth and uncover dinosaur bones and eggs buried in the sandpit.

Interestingly, the guide showed us a chart of how many years dinosaurs and humans had lived on earth, and how long the world had existed before us. She said that if the world was a book of 650 (or however many) pages, a page for each millenium that the world has existed, humans would only feature on the last one or two pages. Kind of puts things in perspective really, and makes you wonder what the world will look like in another million or so years.

We also visited La Recoleta (a little village/monastery and museum in old Spanish-style buildings atop a big hill, with beautiful courtyard gardens, loads of religious art and great views of the city); the ethnographic museum (a huge display of weird masks and the usual pottery, and information on books and the local language); and the cemetery (why not?!).  The cemetery was a bit quirky, really. Very peaceful, lovely gardens, big old trees, lots of big family tombs and crypts, and graves built in concrete blocks, five or six graves high and many, many graves long. The graves looked a bit like the shelves/drawers for bodies in morgues, piled high on top of each other. Most of them have glass fronts with pictures of the deceased, flowers, crosses and other memorabilia. But some are also decorated with musical cards that sound quite creepy when the batteries start to run low and the music turns slow and whiny.

Shopping in Sucre wasn’t particularly special, but I managed to spend a small fortune on gemstones and jewellery. Primarily bolivianite (AKA adventurine), which is a mixture of citrine and amethyst that is only mined in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile (or so I read), and only legal to buy in Bolivia. (I also bought millennium and citrine.)

While it was a little out of the way, Sucre was just the thing to take the edge off our general dislike for Bolivia, and was the perfect place to replenish our energy before embarking on the final couple of legs of our trip – Iguassu and Rio.