No go Oruro. Yay to Sucre!

Having read about Oruro in the guide book, and it not being too far away from La Paz we jumped on a bus (complete with cats and stinky people lying in the aisles) and headed off, our intention being that we would celebrate NYE there. That is until we pulled into the town. Hmmmmm. Not only did it look like it had recently flooded, the outskirts of town was smothered in knee high trash for miles. I wish I'd had my camera at the ready. We all looked at each other and in unison said 'anyone for Sucre?' We had a bus booked out of there for later that night within minutes of arriving.

To pay some homage to Oruro, we did have an absolutely fabulous meal at Restaurant Nayjama - beef stew and home made pasta. Best meal that I've had in ages. And a really enjoyable cab ride - our taxi driver switched the radio over to his gringo compilation CD so was sang along to Roy Orbison, Beach Boys, Mamas & the Papas and The Beatles - loved it. So all in all, our 3 or so hours in Oruro were very enjoyable. Maybe we shouldn't have judged a book by its cover.

We arrived in Sucre very early in the morning - much to the disgust of the night man at our hostel. He did not seem very impressed that we'd awoken him with our incredibly loud banging on the front door in conjunction with continuous ringing of the door bell (well, he shouldn't sleep so deeply if his job is to answer the door!).

Our hostel was really lovely. A rustic building with massive courtyards (complete with old fig tree, terrocotta pots and cast iron lounges) and huge bedrooms. It would have been at least 5x5m for the 3 of us. I quickly had the entire contents of my bag sprawled everywhere.

We'd planned for about 3 nights in Sucre, but we ended up staying longer. Partly due to a heavy night on the town the night before we thought we'd leave at a local club someone suggested to us (could no way face a bus the following day), and partly due to how much we enjoyed it.

We had a really good NYE as well in Sucre at the Joy Ride Café. We'd stumbled across the café earlier in the day as we wandered around trying to find something to eat. While sitting inside, eating a really delicious cooked breakfast, the staff began laying plastic on the floor. Random, we thought. The lawyer in me going - that is really dangerous. Someone is going to slip over that and crack their head. They then started carrying in buckets of sand... Really random, we thought. If I'd not been concentrating so hard on my breakfast and had read the walls, I perhaps would have noticed the 'Beach Party NYE' signs posted all around the room. As we left (or got kicked out as they came closer and closer to us with buckets of sand to the point where we felt we were in the way and had to go) we were told to come back that night - free beer all night. That we did. The place was packed, and there was in fact free beer all night. Woo hoo. There was no countdown though - the NY arrived and I missed it. We couldn't have done a countdown anyway because there was a ton of confusion about the real time; someone thought it was 00:10, someone else 23:55. Everyone you asked had a different time, ah well.

At about 2am Claire and I were hungry, so we ducked out to the plaza where we had our first real sample of street food - who eats wins. I'm still praying that it wasn't dog. It was a skewer with a peanut sauce. It was tasty, so long as it wasn't dog. Not brave enough to ask :s Our second sampling of street food was in the early morning a few days later when we got street hamburgers, with chips stuffed on top. SOOOOO good. And for 5 Bolivianos, or about 80c Australian, they were well worth it.

Next stop - Potosi.