Activity Summary
Friday 20th October - Day 381
Night bus to Sucre
Brunch at Typica Cafe
Hostel chill day
Saturday 21st October - Day 382
Hostel chill day
Dinner at Papote
Walk around Sucre
Sunday 22nd October - Day 383
Parque Cretácico
Dinosaur footprints / Cal Orck’o
Monday 23rd October - Day 384
Nicola very unwell
Emergency check in to a hostel with private bathroom
Dinner at Aosta Caffè Ristorante
Tuesday 24th October - Day 385
Trans Emperador bus to Potosi
Taxi from new terminal to old terminal
Bus to Uyuni
Summary
Sucre
A much nicer city than La Paz to walk around in but there really aren't great food options. We certainly didn’t see everything because of Nicola being ill.
Transport
Sucre
Taxi to La Paz bus terminal
Night bus to Sucre
Taxi to hostel
Accommodation
Sucre - Casa de Huespedes Isabella
Number of nights - 3
Price per night per person - £8
Positives:
Cheap for Sucre
Breakfast included
Big rooms
Nice owners
Decent WiFi
Kitchen
Location is decent
Negatives:
Worst shower we have had in an age
Shared bathroom
Recommend?
For a budget yes. For illness no.
Sucre - Cittadella Hostal
Number of nights - 1
Price per night per person - £10
Positives:
Private bathroom
Big room with two beds
Decent WiFi
Location
Negatives:
No kitchen
Expensive
Recommend?
Yes
Diary
Friday 20th October - Day 381
Turns out despite having a full recliner bed, Nicola still can’t sleep on a bus.
To be fair to her, our seats at the front of the bus on the top deck had some serious bounce to them. The roads to Sucre seemingly had speed bumps everywhere and it was windy and non-flat roads. The churn was real.
Nicola’s window seat had quite a lot of heat coming out of it so Luke was perfectly happy switching and dealt with this fine, passing out for the whole journey from 10pm as he was shattered.
Nicola didn’t sleep much at all and on the home stretch to Sucre had to make use of one of her all important flight attained sick bags, apparently brought on from lack of sleep and exhaustion rather than a bumpy travel sickness ride.
On our arrival at 8am Nicola perched on the side of the road and Luke dealt with the bags which were very strangely told to put up with us in our footwell. These did not fit very well at all and it would have been so much easier had they stayed in the bus lock up.
There was a taxi waiting outside the bus terminal and got this straight to the hostel without much problem, although in Bolivia these are incredibly hard to spot as they come in all shapes, sizes and colours so are only recognisable from the word ‘taxi’ written on them somewhere.
At our hostel we ended up sitting upstairs in a sort of garden common room for a few hours until our room came available at 10.30am. Nicola slept and Luke just stared vacuously at his phone, not saying a word to the same Austrian girl from the taxi the day before. Never fun communicating when tired and not wanting to.
With our room now ready Nicola now had the energy to make it outside for some food. After researching this all morning it didn’t look like the food scene in Sucre was good at all, and the best rated cafe being Typica let us down. The setting of the place was super nice but the service was so slow and the food overly salty and dry. Not often we write bad reviews about cafes.
The SAS supermarket was nearby (and is massive) so we stocked up on some food to cook for later.
The rest of the day we spent in bed, Luke watching the rugby and then cooked a tomato paprika rice dish. This didn’t settle very well in Nicola’s stomach but at this point hadn’t caused any significant problems.
Saturday 21st October - Day 382
Breakfast at the hostel was pretty nice. They provided decent bread (for once), eggs, bananas, jam and coffee which was all set in the nice courtyard of the hostel. Luke certainly enjoyed the mornings.
Nicola chatted to Tilly, Luke, his dad and we both watched the England South Africa rugby game on the hostel WiFi plus a VPN. This sadly was not overly effective but we made it work despite the constant freezing of images.
Dinner was well and truly disappointing, going to a smokehouse called Papote. Do not recommend it. To make us feel a little better we had an evening stroll to the main square and back.
Sunday 22nd October - Day 383
Nicola had finally started feeling alive. So today we opted to go to Parque Cretácico, a place dedicated to dinosaurs of South America and specifically where some fossilised footprints exist.
Being a Sunday the square was full on closed. We were looking for the Dino bus at 11am that would take us to the park but couldn’t find it on a run around of the cathedral block. Just as we’d given up and started walking to the stalls lining the main square we spotted the unmistakable double decker dino bus on another corner. At £2pp it’s a pretty cheap return ride.
On both the ride there and back we ended up sitting in front of a local who should not have been on the bus or better yet, should have worn a mask and used his hand to cough. The guy was grim and wouldn’t stop dying the whole time.
With tickets purchased we spent a little time watching a dino movie in Spanish (no idea what was going on) before the English tour started close to 12pm. The guide walked us around the very small park complex, saying some things about dinosaurs and how Sucre was more of a commuter place than home for dinosaurs.
The footprints tour was the main event. With hard hats on we descended into a valley where a huge slab of apparent mountainside protruded out of the ground.
It turns out this slab was an old flat marsh that over time had fossilised and been pushed up by tectonic movement. It was discovered with the mining in the area and softer surface material had washed away to leave the footprints. The place is called Cal Orck’o.
It was pretty cool and Nicola went full nerd, loving being out and about again.
Back at the park we had some of the messiest empanadas, leaking chicken fluid all over the nice clean floors of the place.
The return bus at 1.30pm was pretty well timed and after running off the bus because of this ill twat, we were back at the hostel to chill all evening.
Day 3 of the leftover rice did not do Nicola a solid.
Monday 23rd October - Day 384
Not a happy Nicola. From about 6am she was locked into the shared bathroom toilet, quote ‘peeing out of her bum and not leaving for fear of losing her throne’.
She cursed the decision to eat the rice (although Luke was absolutely fine) and we booked into another Sucre hostel down the road that offered her the sanctum of being able to poop on demand in peace.
We watched and waited to see whether Nicola would be able to make the paid for night bus but in the end we scrapped that plan to remove all the stress of needing to emergency poop into a food bag on the night bus, for fear of there being no toilet. This comment by Nicola made Luke both laugh and cry.
To give her credit she had to take a job related phone call in the morning and put on a great brave face when doing so. Could hardly tell she was ill until she came down for breakfast looking like a shrivelled prune from water loss.
Luke did the shuttle run to and from the new hostel, managing to check in at 11am and then carrying bags to and from the old place.
After some time relaxing we went back to lunch at Typica, thinking they could only improve on the avo & salted cheese sandwich from before. This time the service was worse and the chicken sandwich was the driest thing we’d eaten for an absolute age.
No bueno and Nicola was less than happy.
The hostel acted as our afternoon refuge until going out for dinner at Aosta Caffè Ristorante. The pasta was enjoyable (and didn’t exacerbate any pre-existing conditions) but it was a far cry from the glorious spot in Cusco. Sucre food sucks.
Tuesday 24th October - Day 385
Thankfully Nicola was feeling a lot better and the revised plan of travelling to Uyuni by day (where Nicola’s bowel movements are much more stable) a feasible option.
A morning bank and pharmacy run preluded our hailed taxi from the side of the street to the bus terminal where we booked onto the 10am Trans Emperador bus to Potosi. It would be a 3 hour ish ride along mountain roads but reasonably comfortable. The only not comfortable part was having to push and argue with some guys in front hell bent on reclining all the way back on their seats - Nicola put a stop to this pretty well.
Just after 1pm we were at the bus terminal in Potosi. Luke did a loop of the bus providers on the second floor to find out the new terminal we were in didn’t service Uyuni. So we had to make our way to the exit, flag a taxi down (which took a while because there weren’t many at all) and made our way to the old terminal.
Thankfully there was a bus taking off at 2pm so we didn’t have to wait long, paid B60 and were on the 4 hour journey to Uyuni. Again it was pretty comfortable, able to separate and spread over 4 seats for 75% of the journey until a ton of people got on and we sat together again.
What we didn’t enjoy so much was the lack of substantial sustenance we went with. We didn’t eat breakfast bar some bananas and the road trip food consisted of more bananas, biscuits and sweets. Days like this we miss meal deals so badly.
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