Lucie & Rhys´s Honeymoon Adventure: Week 16

Our second day in Sucre we took a taxi out to the Mercado Campesinos with Hanne and Wim, street after street of market stalls selling fruit, veg, meat, clothes and anything else you could possibly need. The rest of the day was pretty relaxed, lunch in the central market and dinner with Wim and Hanne at a pub on the main plaza.

The next morning we were up early to pack our bags and head over to the tour office where we’d booked a two day hike into the Maragua crater (thanks Ceri and Billy for the Christmas present!). We set out with our guide Nelson and our driver Willy (haha, Willy Nelson) for a 1.5 hour drive on unpaved tracks winding up into the mountains. Willy dropped us at a church, built on the site of a miraculous discovery of a stone carved virgin Mary that only opens for one day a year. We headed off for a 6km walk downhill along an inca trail with Nelson stopping us every now and then to point out medicinal plants and other flora and fauna and patches of quartz crystal. After the trail ended we joined a dirt track and followed it along a river to a suspension bridge, after wading across a river we spent the next hour or so trekking up a mountain where the soil is a mix of bright greens and reds before dropping in to the crater. In the crater you can see where the meteorite impact forced all the earth around it up and the locals believe that when god created the earth he got bored, sat in the middle of the crater and squidged the earth up with his thumb leaving a circle of fingerprints – kind of hard to picture unless you’ve seen it granted.

When we got to Maragua village in the centre of the crater, having hiked 21km, we settled into our stone cottage and headed out to see the devils cave on the outskirts of the village. The cottages are community cottages owned by the village and the rent gets split between the families and spent on things for the community like building new schools. Later Nelson set the log fire in our cottage before dishing up a two course meal. Rhys spent the next hour stoking the fire and putting in every piece of wood he could find.

Day two of the hike began with breakfast served outside overlooking the mountains. The start of the days 18km hike was all up hill until we got to the ridge of the crater. Even more so than the first day lots of local kids came up to us to ask for sweets, we handed out colour pencils and shared our lunch boxes and Rhys bought a fossil from one of the kids. After a couple of hours we followed the valley to the Niño Mayo dinosaur footprints where you can walk among and touch prints that were uncovered by the rains one wet season. Although not many footprints are on show because the community doesn’t have the money to excavate, you can clearly see the marks from a T-Rex, Triceratops and some other dinosaur with 3 toes and a couple of smaller dinosaurs who were clearly running away from the T-Rex. It took a couple more hours to hike to the meeting point where Willy and the car were. On the drive back to Sucre we stopped at a canyon complete with swooping parakeets and at a mirador where you could see the route we’d taken over the past two days. Back in Sucre we checked into a hostel and slept.

Our last day in Sucre was a catch up day, we slept in, went to the market for lunch and tried unsuccessfully to find an internet café with Skype. We had a bus booked for 4:30pm to Samaipata in the West of Bolivia, supposedly 10 hours away.

After about 2 hours on the bus, with my chair broken and the woman behind Rhys touching his head every few minutes the paved road ran out. We spent the next 11 hours being jiggled within an inch of our lives, sleeping wasn’t an option and to make it more interesting Bolivian buses, unlike those we’ve been on in every other country, don’t have loos on board. When we finally pulled into Samaipata at 5:30am the following morning we were pretty tired and ready for bed. We hadn’t booked a hostel and figured we’d just find somewhere when we arrived but it didn’t prove to be an easy task. Two hours late we were at the end of our tether, the hostels were either fully booked or didn’t open their doors at night. By 7:30am we decided to check into a place which we’d heard so many bad reviews about just so we could sleep.

We got up at lunch time and headed into the plaza for food. It’s a really sleepy little village surrounded by lush green mountains, it feels quite Mediterranean, all the roofs have terracotta tiles, the sun blazes every day and everything shuts at lunch time for a siesta. Give it 10 more years and it will be just like San Pedro in Chile, just with cloud forest instead of desert. After lunch we moved hostels and booked three nights in a lovely place right on the main plaza, we even treated ourselves to a room with a private bathroom and a terrace with views of the mountains where I’m sitting to write this (bear in mind when I say treat, it still only cost £5.50 each a night, just a bit more than the £2 each at the cheapest most basic hostel in town). That night we headed up to a hotel restaurant we’d been recommended a few blocks out of the village. We sat outside in the candlelit courtyard and the food was immense, Rhys even had gourmet BBQ Texan baked beans (in fact we liked it so much and it was so cheap compared to the other places in the village that we ended up going again the next night and are off there again tonight!!).

Our second day here we booked a trip out into the surrounding mountains and valleys with an American couple Rebecca and Skylar and a German girl, also Rebecca (thanks for the Christmas present Rhys’s Bampa, Nanny Lal and Ted!!). We were picked up at our hostel and drove for an hour or so out of the village and along a dirt track winding up around a mountain. When we got out we started to hike and headed uphill for another hour or so before walking along the peak of the mountain chain and then dropping into the valley to the river where we sat and ate lunch. We then spent the next couple of hours wading down river through butterflies and orchids, it was so much fun. When you weren’t sinking thigh deep in the soft sands underfoot you were climbing over boulders and down waterfalls or swimming across deep bits holding your bag over your head. Nearing the end of the trip we got out of the river, put our shoes back on, weaved in and out of a herd of cows and walked through the Cuevas waterfalls where hundreds of locals were cooling down and splashing about with their families. After a well needed shower, that night we ate with the other 3 from our tour.

Today we caught a taxi out to El Fuerte, some ruins about 10km from the village on top of a mountain where there’s a 2km track with viewing platforms to walk around. The ruins weren’t so impressive but the site itself was incredibly peaceful and you can see why it became such an important and magical spiritual and ritual site for so many cultures. They still don’t know much about it but it’s apparently one of the most important pre-Colombian sites in the world. After lunch back in the plaza we’ve spent the afternoon chilling in our hostel.