Waking up early we try in vain to catch up with the blog – we are now 3 weeks behind! Sorry everyone this mean there is going to be a flurry or two of updates!
By the time we have packed and are ready for brekkie, Josh and Elise are already out exploring and Sarah is either hiding in her room or has also gone out for food. We head of for Florin’s as the breakfast and internet are pretty good there, a warmer location for blog writing!
We get a solid hour and a half blogging in before we are off to the market for our rendezvous with the troops. Elena is there and we quickly exchange money and say goodbye as she has a bus to catch. We agree to meet up with Paul (who is off to Cochabamba) and Phil (joining us in La Paz) in Florin later.
For the next couple of hours we give Josh and Elise an insight into Sucre as we know it – although it seems to remind us of all the things we still haven’t done! We also buy a big cake from the cake stall at the market to say gracias to Roxanna and all the team back at Wasi Masi – It’s great there are a dozen stalls selling cakes in all sizes who will decorate them to order including writing a message.
Leaving Josh and Elise to explore on their own, we head back to Florin where we spend the time left before our bus blogging and chatting to Paul, Phil, Nadine (also off to Cochabamba) and Richard & Stephanie. We also meet Sven & Delphine who we haven’t seen since the trek. They are on the same bus as us to La Paz tonight. Apparently he has been really ill with a fever since we came off the trek. So it seems there must have been a bug of some sort that he and Huw caught as the symptoms are nearly identical.
Finally, it is time to say goodbye to Roxanna, Wasi Masi and Sucre 🙁
It’s really tough as this has felt like a second home – we console ourselves with the thought that new adventures lie ahead!
We share a taxi up to the bus with Richard (Kiwi) and Romain (we think French – sorry bit vague on your details 😉 At the bus station we exchange our booking slip for tickets and leave our bags behind the check-in desk airline style (except of course there is no conveyor belts!!) to be loaded for us. Not really sure why they don’t ask passengers to load their own bags like everywhere else as the bag loading process is not the most genteel! The office is on the first floor and the bags are lowered (dumped) to the ground floor using a hook on a rope and then dragged to the bus ~ fingers crossed nothing gets broken 🙁
The bus itself is ok if a little threadbare – we are downstairs in cama seats and quickly get settled, although a bit grumpy that (a) the booking agent took a 10% commission and (b) that the lads are in fully horizontal executive camas!! Not sure how that happened. Sven & Delphine join us downstairs.
The journey is supposed to be pretty hairy, bad roads, bad driving etc. For which the best solution is to go to sleep, which we mostly manage apart from a really dodgy loud Jean Claude van Damme movie and a stopover in Potosi 3 hours into the journey. We assume that the stop is for refreshments and toilet, but no, we have stopped outside the bus station and people are only getting off for a smoke. Which would be ok if the toilet on the bus wasn’t locked – don’t know about you but 12 hours without the loo is a bit much!!! After a bit of shouting and stamping of feet, Delphine, ably assisted by a Bolivian guy who takes up the cause manages to get the driver to unlock the door…hooray!