Last day in Potosi

The day after the mines we decided to stay in Potosi for the morning and to get to Sucre in the afternoon just in time to get the 7pm bus to Cochabamba. We had to take the night bus because there are no day buses going to Cochabamba!!! So again we missed out on what seemed a very scenic road, on top of risking our lives again. And we are not paranoid... On the way to Potosi we saw a bus lying on its side in a ditch next to the road (only 3 m or so deep, no precipice luckily) and found out that the driver had fallen asleep at 4 am in the morning: no dead. Then, while driving from Potosi to Sucre, we saw the carcass of a bus lying in the middle of a dried river bed, and could not quite understand how the hell it had gotten there... till we realised that it had gone straight through the railing of the bridge after coming down from a steep serpentine and rolled several times to the middle of the river: 18 dead. This also happened in the early morning. Apparently brake failure. So, towards the early morning on our night bus to Cochabamba, looking down into the precipices we could kind of see in the night, we were quite worries, at least I was. Gregory was not sitting next to the window and had his eyes closed, so I don´t think he suffered as much as I did. Anyways, we did make it to Cochabamba alive, urrah. From now on we should not have any more night buses to take, fingers crossed.

We came to Cochabamba with a view to visit the Toro Toro national park. This turned out to be far too expensive - over $200 each for 3 days jeep tour - and frankly, after having been to S Pedro and Uyuni for peanuts, we thought it´s just not worth it, especially when we can do with some extra time to spend around La Paz and Lake Titicaca. So we are moving on from Cochabamba for La Paz straight away. Cochabamba is the town from which Marta, my auntie Zia Maria´s carer was from. It is a rather messy place full of market stalls everywhere, quite ugly really. They seem to have quite a few flight agencies here, and lots of flights to Milan and Bergamo!!!

So far, the best city in Bolivia for us has been Potosi. Sucre is refined but Potosi is where life flows. Its old streets are really lovely, and the market is also a very interesting place. We have now developed a better tecnique to take pictures of people who don´t want to be photographed, so we have had a lot of fun with taking a few really good shots. Here are some.

This is cow´s heads they are selling. Apparently a typical dish of the Altiplano, cow´s head soup... and they only cost 2 Bs ( about $ 0.25)

The coffee here is very good...guaranteed by Gregory (TM)