Christmas in Sucre

A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all!

We are currently in Sucre, which is a pretty, white-washed colonial city in the south of Bolivia, the original capital of the country, and still the sort-of-capital (like most things in Bolivia, it's a grey area). It's also at 'only' 2000m, meaning it's significantly warmer than we've ogtten used to.

As we knew we were going to spend christmas here we booked into a very fancy place with private bathroom, hot showers, no beasties in the beds, hammocks and all sorts of luxuries, but even so we worked out that we're spending about 18 pounds a night!! (200 bolivianos sounds much more expensive!).

Anyway, as you will have seen from the 'card' we sent out, we made it as festive as possible, finding a miniature tree, panettone and bottle of bubbly at the market, and then on Christmas Eve we sang some carols with the guitar and then went to Midnight Mass- here, that involved a drunken marching band and a huge crowd holding Baby Jesuses in little baskets following the Archbishop around the city in a very noisy procession. Unfortunately that was pretty much the end of our festive period- I hadn't been 100% for a few days but on xmas days I was swollen up like a balloon of noxious gases and couldn't eat anything, in the end on Mum's advice we went to the (luckily decent) hospital here for some tests.

The next day I was already on the mend and I feel much better now- at least one of the various pills must have done the trick! In the last two days we've been making up for our non-xmas by wolfing down industrial quantities of home-made apple pie and cream at the 'Berlin Kultur Cafe', a luxury of the sort we didn't think we'd see until February!

Now we're rested and ready to move- tonight we take a bus to Santa Cruz, the biggest city in Bolivia, fairly near the border with Brazil. Basically it's farewell to the Andes and its very particular people, styles of dress, climate, music, food and all the rest of it- from now on I'm not sure what to expect but I'm sure it'll be very different!

Our plan is to attempt to cross the 'Chaco' into Paraguay, but at times the road is impassable due to the weather (and at the best of times I don't think it's exactly the autobahn), so we'll keep you posted when we get to Santa Cruz and ask around.

Love to you all!

(PS and a big thanks to Mum, Stu, N&G, our skype chat was my xmas highlight!)

Ross (and Adele) x x x

Un lungo post per dire che abbiamo passo un romantico natale tra il bagno e l ospedale,amzi per l esattezza l Istituto boloviano giapponese di gartroenterologia!Adesso siamo di nuovo in forma pero. Auguri a tutti!