Sucre can be sweet as sugar if you make it out of there alive

A few days have again turned to a couple of weeks – how do other travel bloggers do this?! I'm going to give you guys a brake and divide this entry into several shorter ones. Let's start with Sucre were we spent the first days of July.


In arrival to Sucre we had only one mission: to find a hotel with wifi and central heating. After running into a few receptions with the cab waiting outside we finally found one, right on the main square of the city. The price for our triple room was very expensive on the Bolivian scale, but a luxurious with two bathrooms, three big beds, sitting area and a view to the square for 30€ per night was just what we were used to. Not. (A pause for Borat).


The drama
(I'll save my original 611 word description of the events for myself and tell you what happened in 106.) After having a great vegetarian lunch at a nearby restaurant and discovering a beautiful sun terrace just on top of our room, Eilis had gone down to the reception to use the internet and left me and Erik alone in our room. It was time for the worst 15 minutes of life (so far) to begin: Erik had an epileptic seizure. I somehow managed to remember what to do and try to keep as calm as I could but as the seizure was over, his memory come back and doctor on his way for a check-up, I went for a big hysteric weep outside our room.

A nice elderly, English speaking doctor ordered a few sleeping pills and said that the seizure was perhaps caused by lack of sleep during our uncomfortable bus ride the night before (see previous entry), perhaps by forgetting his medication in the morning, but a new episode would now be unlikely. That hardly stopped me from watching Erik's every move and hating every second of being outside our room getting take-out dinner for all three of us. Going to the bathroom I had first seen him collapsed in was just as bad. Worst 15 minutes of my life so far were gone, but would continue hunting me long after everyone else, including Erik, had gone back to their normal lives. Never have I understood better how my loved ones felt after I had my stroke 15 months ago.

The next day we took it easy eating delicious home ice cream, walking in the town and seeing a beautiful “Dancing waters” fountain, light & music show in the city park in the evening and filling our groaning tummies with some German vegetarian food. What surprised us about the fountain show was the Bolivians' way to show their gratitude: after an hour of exquisite entertainment watched by hundreds of local people for free, we were the only ones to put our hands together and show our appreciation of the amazing work it must have taken to put it together.

Another surprise followed the next day as we went to see the dinosaur tracks footprints that were first discovered in 1994 by workers from the local Sucre cement factory and our now known as a part of Parque Cretácico Cal Orck'o (entry 3€) . This place has the world's largest collection of dinosaur tracks with about 5,000 impressions of dinosaur footprints from at least 250 different dinosaurs embedded on a gigantic, near-vertical limestone rock. What's shocking is that absolutely nothing has been done to protect these tracks from the erosion which means that something that was protected by the mother earth for 60 million years will vanish for good in less than 50 after its been discovered by man. So hurry up, you don't want to miss these!