Red Dirt & Mandioca

I like Sucre a lot. It's a small city (around 220,000 Sucrences) with a very present Spanish colonial style. Colonial Andalusian architecture says wikipedia. Sucre held title as the capital of Bolivia until La Paz took the reins in 1898. The city still serves as the constitutional capital and the Supreme Court is located here.

The city center is clean, the locals are incredibly friendly and it seems as if there is a bar or church on every street in the town center. Two great options to cater to your mental state. Sucre is also home to the Universidad Mayor Real & Pontificia de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca, which is one of the oldest universities in the Americas.

Luckily our loosely planned itinerary landed us here during the Virgin de Guadalupe festival. The festival consists of endless parades, bands, traditional Bolivian dance/dress and South Side Irish Parade levels of consumption.

THE CATHEDRAL

San Francisco Church - One of several churches in Sucre

The Virgin of Guadalupe Shrine

The parade started at around 8am and went well past midnight. It was intense. The traditional dress, marching bands and lively locals were the highlights of the night.

My next Halloween costume

Puerto Busch is a small army outpost on the Rio Paraguay. The port is in the middle of nowhere, several hours from the nearest town. It was the first place in Bolivia we would see.

We paid a friend of one of the 5 Bolivian soldiers stationed at the port to drive us to Quijarro, where we could buy our Bolivian visas and officially enter the country. On the way we nearly hit several Nandu Guazu or Rhea. Our driver liked to beep at the fleeing, terrified birds.

Below: Welcome to Bolivia - the sign you would see entering from Brazil.

Our first go at Bolivian street food in Quijarro. After two years of Paraguayan food it was a nice change of pace. Below is a typical Bolivian dish of boiled corn, potatoes, and chicken covered in a hot salsa. Coming from a country were hot food is basically non-existent it was nice to eat something that burned the crap out of your mouth.

Below: Llajua or llajwa pronounced (ya-hua). The sauce has a slight resemblance to a mexican style salsa but less flavorful. It is made from hot chili peppers, tomato, onion and a Bolivian herb called kikina. I've been slathering it all over fried chicken (which is very big here) and french fries. Yeah, real healthy.

Below: Milanesa (Bread Fried Steak) Bolivian Style - soon to be slathered in in llawja.

Quijarro is a border town that doesn't offer much for gringos looking to see things. After eating a few unhealthy but delicious street meals we spent the night in a classy hole in the wall (for about 4 dollars) and jumped on the Death Train to Santa Cruz.

Above: Tim and I people watching during one of several train stops.

The “Death Train” travels between the border town of Quijarro and Bolivia's biggest city Santa Cruz. There are three possible reasons as to why it has its current title.

1. The train ride is so long and bumpy that you will want to kill yourself before the trip is over. 2. The train has a history of derailing and killing its passengers.

3. The train once transported the bodies of Yellow Fever victims.

I have no sources for any of these explanations.

The trip took 18 hours and no suicidal thoughts were had during the ride. It was a bit shaky but I feared more for my stomach than anything else after slamming so much fried chicken in Quijarro. I arrived to Santa Cruz mildly rested and thankful I didn't have to test the Death Train's bathroom situation.

Santa Cruz

From Wikipedia: Santa Cruz de la Sierra was founded on February 26, 1561 by Nuflo de Chavez who gave the new settlement its name, which means "Holy Cross of the Hills," in honor of his beloved native city in Extremadura, Spain. It has a urban population is 1,545,161 (2008 official estimate) which makes it the largest city in Bolivia.