To Sucre

Leaving Santa Cruz de la Sierra and driving towards Sucre meant leaving the Amazonas at sea level and heading back up on altitude. The drive was beautiful, all the way to Sucre.

We spent a night in Aiquile, in a small hotel run by a family that also housed their ostriches Princesa and Spartacus, a group of peacocks, hens with chickens, and a gang of dogs.

We left Aiquile rather early and arrived in Sucre before noon. Here we stayed in a fancy hotel with amazing rooms and real history. Sucre is a white city, with beautiful buildings and very friendly locals. It is the birth place of Bolivia, and the legal capital. We have been amazed by the care Bolivians take of their gardens and parks, both public areas and private. They are also very house proud and the quality and attention to detail of their building work is different from every other place we have visited on the whole trip.

A word about the petrol situation in Bolivia. We learned already in La Paz that petrol was hard to come by. We managed to find a petrol station before we left where a kind local filled up the tank and allowed us to take some in one of our jerrycans. The next thing we learned is that in order to get petrol in a foreign vehicle, the registration number, the driver's license and the home country had to be registered at the pump before any petrol was sold. In one of them Costa Rica was not on the list of countries, so the staff had to call head office to get it added! Some petrol stations didn't have the facility to add foreigners, and could therefore not sell petrol to us. This registration at the pump, we learned, was done with all vehicles, not just tourists. Bolivian plated cars got petrol at the local price, and tourists at the tourist rate. This is a totally political thing, as is the administration, and the staff weren't all that happy about it. We managed, and it was easier to understand how it worked once we learned all the rules and regulations.