Living in a Box

Wednesday 14 April
Santa Cruz – Sucre

I had made a tactical error. Arriving in Santa Cruz at about 1.30 am I had a flight to Sucre booked for about 8 am. So I had about seven hours to kill in Santa Cruz. But I hadn’t booked a hostel. I can’t remember why I didn’t do that. Perhaps I thought I could sleep in the airport. This wasn’t really an option in the traditional sense.

I say traditional because it wasn’t going to be a case of sleeping on the benches. But purely by chance I found a place that was offering box rooms with beds in them. It was much like those Japanese cubicle things except for more room-like. It was a bed – mattress and pillow only, no duvet – with a plasma screen showing cable, and a gap under the bed to put the bags. There was even a bedside table and a minibar. It was actually pretty expensive but it was what I needed so I wasn't complaining.

It turned out I couldn’t sleep in my clothes without a cover so for the first time since the start of the trip, my sleeping bag finally saw some use as a replacement duvet. The first time in three months. It was also at this time that I realised I had lost my sunglasses. There was a small opaque window in the door that was letting in light from the terminal and keeping me awake so I covered my eyes with a t-shirt. I fell asleep and slept quite well.

I woke up and caught my flight to Sucre. This was a Bolivian airline so we’re talking different rules than most other countries. It was a dodgy, old 727 and the landing was one of the bounciest I’ve had for a while. I caught a taxi to the hostel and saw Sucre for the first time. The colonial centre is fairly pretty with nice white buildings that have to be whitewashed once a year by law. For some reason there is a dentist on practically every block, if not two. Maybe the whiteness of the buildings has made people super-aware of their teeth. Probably not. But it seems a bit weird.

I check in to the hostel and find I’m in a very small and cramped six bed dorm, that I don’t fancy staying in. I decide to upgrade to a private room, which is a good idea. I sort myself out and have some lunch. I look around for sunglasses but in the one store I find the cheapest pair is 350 Bolivianos – a little more than £30! And I thought Bolivia was supposed to be cheap. I don’t bother with them for now.

The other thing about Sucre is that all the buses are Japanese. They still have the Japanese writing on them, with the Spanish Bolivian signs overlaid where necessary. Good to see the global economy in action.

In the evening I meet up with some Australians I met briefly in the dorm when I checked in, and join their extended group which includes more Australians a couple of English girls and a German guy called Philip. We go for a meal in a place called Florin and the food is pretty good. I have a good chat with German Phil about geology – he has been studying it in Chile and Argentina and I have to say geology is one of my big areas of curiosity, essentially wanting to answer the question, why does it [insert interesting piece of landscape here] look like that? Geology rocks (geddit?!? I just thought of that!). And if you’re into Geology, then there’s no better place than the Andes, as Phil pointed out.

We all have a good chat and after the meal head off to Joyride, another bar. While we’re there it turns out that we’re all due to go to the salt flats in a couple of days. This is awesome – I needed to find a group to go round the salt flats with and here was exactly that. We sorted out emails as we were taking different routes to get there over the next couple of days. We end the night drinking and having fun before heading back to the hostel.