Sucre, Manu Chau and La Glorieta
Trip Start
Jan 26, 2000
1
16
30
Trip End
Jun 14, 2000
La Paz was next on the itinerary and we purchased some tickets that afternoon for the overnight bus that evening. Just as were were packing to leave Francois found that a french singer, Manu Chau (anyone heard of him?), was playing in Sucre in two days time. I've never seen a french man get excited, he was so excited about being able to go home and tell all he friends that he'd seen Manu Chau that we decided to forfeit our tickets that night and head for Sucre next day. We had an excellent evening and went to a Peņa that evening, a peņa is where they play traditional Andean music at the same time as you eat. The main instrument were zampoņa(pan flute) and the haunting Andean music which came from the 5 guys is they slowly danced around the room made for a superbly atmospheric dining experience. Off to Sucre the next morning, during the ride the landscape changed from dry and dusty to lots of greenery, it was a nice change after spending the last couple of weeks in the desert and other dry dusty landscapes. In Sucre I was to meet some friends, Ginny and Abel. I arrived and after making 2 interesting phone calls with their cleaner using my best Spanish (still bloody diabolical), I was able to decipher that they had gone to meet me at the bus station (I had got off the bus in the town centre) and also that the address I had was not an address at all but a post box. Ten minutes later after some more muddled Spanish and a taxi ride I arrived at their place. It was nice to stay somewhere other than a hotel where I could wander into the kitchen and make myself a cup of good English tea and just sit in the garden and soak up the sun. Sucre is said to be Bolivia's most beautiful city and with it's centre filled with only white buildings (some law has been passed stipulating this) and it's many churches it can be seen why. I thought Sucre would be the ideal place to relax for a while and catch up on some sleep. I was wrong. The next morning I woke at 6am to complete a small hike on a hill just on the edge of town with Annie, a friend of Ginny's who had been staying there for the last 6 weeks. The evening was the big night of Manu Chau, I thought it'd be a quiet night and we'd be back in bed by 11pm. The music turned out to be really good, Francois didn't have such bad taste after all. The music was mainly Spanish revolutionary songs in a reggae style and I ended up bopping the night away with lots of other backpackers into the early hours of the morning. The next day I probably did my most disappointing excursion. We went to see some tyrannosaurus rex footprints, we had been told that we would get a detailed description and information about the prints. In the end we drove up to a cement factory, had a policeman, who had no interest in the prints what so ever, march us passed them (they appeared high in a cliff) without giving us any information at all. Oh well not every day can be full of excitement. A few other places we visited in Sucre were a weaving museum, it was very interesting to watch the women weave rugs in the same way they had done for the last 3000 years. These rugs, no bigger that one metre by one metre, took 3 months to finish. I still can't work out how the hell the women had the patience to finish them. They were quite exquisite when finished, but at $300 a pop they were a bit out of my price range. Finally we visited La Glorieta, a mansion, just out of town, that was developed at the beginning of the century and incorporated all sorts of different architectures from around the world. After a nice Easter Friday spent munching hot cross buns and fruit cake, very nice they were too and a welcome change from Bolivian food, I said my goodbyes and headed off for Sorata, a small village seated in a lowland valley of the Cordillera Real, perfect hiking country.
