Sucre and Cochabamba

As I had such a short time left I ended up seeing three cities in three days - Potosi, Sucre and Cochabamba. It was very rushed but nice to be able to compare them.

Sucre is an old colonial town and is the constitutional capital of La Paz. It was were the declaration of independence was signed and, incidentally, neither Bolivar nor Sucre were present at the signing. It is a very nice city - a lot of the buildings are white washed and the old colonial towns always have very impressive architecture.

Just outside of Sucre there are also dinosaur footprints. I didn´t really know what to expect but it was surprisingly impressive. The rock that they found the footprints on is now vertical because of tectonic plate activity. It made it slightly confusing when you see a diagram of it as our guide didn´t explain this at first! It´s amazing how well preserved the footprints are. You can see the tracks and some of them go on for several hundred metres and there are lots of different tracks made by different dinosaurs. You can´t get very close as the hillside that the tracks are on isn´t very stable and can collapse but we were able to see a photo of some people close to the footprints - they´re huge!

After exploring Sucre I got on a nightbus to Cochabamba and arrived very early in the morning - there´s very few reasons for being awake at 5.30am but it meant there was plenty of time to explore Cochabamba. It was very differnt from Sucre as it seemed much busier and is much bigger.

The most famous thing about it is the Cristo de la Concordia which is the largest statue of Jesus in the world. I climbed up the stairs to it - originally it seemed a better choice than taking the cable car. It was quite a warm day though and Cochabamba is known for having a warmer climate than the rest of Bolivia. However, after struggling up the stairs it actually turned out to be a relativley short walk. The Cristo de la Concordia is fairly impressive, and absolutely huge! The views of Cochabamba were much better though and I hadn´t realised how big the city was but it seemed to go on for miles.

Out of the three cities they all had a very different atmosphere to them and very different histories. Potosi is known for the mining and that is were most of it´s industry comes from, Sucre is famous for being the constitutional capital and is proud of the fact that it is where the declaration was signed and Cochabamba is much busier and more bustling than the other two. I wish I had more time in Bolivia to explore them all properly!