Bolivia: Sucre

Sucre is known as the White City of the Americas, and it lives up to its moniker with striking white architecture and all the colonial trappings of grandeur and elegance. It`s a really beautiful city, and the setting is superb. It feels like the perfect place to start a Once Upon A Time fairytale. We spent our days strolling its streets, admiring its churches, climbing its bell towers, and poking our heads into all of its museums. Including the Natural History Museum, where Eric was nearly attacked by a condor!

It was in Sucre where we embarked on our most cheesy tour....taking the Dino Truck to the Parque Cretacico, Bolivia`s Jurassic Park. Bumping along in the back of a pick-up truck outfitted with bench seats and dinosaur claws, we made our way to the cement factory where the world`s longest track of dinosaur footprints were found while excavating cement. To be fair, and despite our goofy photos, the place was impressive. They discovered the footprints a mere 25 years ago, and the once-flat earth has since been tectonically pushed into a steep wall, but you can easily see scores of various dinosaur prints. It`s pretty incredible. The museum is well done, and they have all these recreations of dinosaurs that are supposed to be anatomically accurate based on skin fossils and bones. Best yet, they have piped in sound!

On a completely unrelated note, we also discovered that Che Guevara stayed in the same hotel as us! We didn`t think he went in for colorful patios with garden fountains and cable TV. Who knew?

Speaking of political figures, we had a really interesting and shocking conversation with a taxi driver en route to the bus station. He was the first non-Evo Morales supporter that we`ve met. Instead, he advocated for a hard line leader with a military presence in Bolivia. He said that the reason Chile was so rich, was because of Pinochet and that Bolivia needed a Pinochet. When we questioned the death toll under Pinochet and suggested there were other ways to affect economic change, he said the deaths were necessary to get Chile where it is today. We decided to keep our traps shut. But undeniably Bolivia suffers from losing coastal access to Chile, and jealousies and comparisons run rampant.