Sucre - スクレ

8月12日
夜行バスに乗ってラパスからスクレへ！シートはビジネスクラスみたいに180°にリクライニングできて足を伸ばせて悠々できました！・・・が道が結構ガタガタしてて安眠はできなかったけど。。
スクレはボリビアの元首都でヨーロッパ風の建築物が中央広場周辺に建っていてなかなか素敵な感じ☆

So.. Overnight bus to Sucre. The "cama suite" chairs were everything you could hope for from a seat that turns into a bed. The bus even had heat as promised and the driver played "the professional" in it's entirety. But right about the time the movie ended, the road started to get bumpy. I tried to sleep at this point, but I was bumping and rocking around with the poorly paved road. Kaori and I drifted in and out of sleep for the next 9 hours - with a few nutty pit-stops to use the toilet. The driver kept letting people on the bus throughout the night - some tried to sell us things. One really drunk guy went around collecting change. And at 3:00 AM a whole family complete with crying baby got on and hitched a ride down the road. I couldn't tell if the driver or the bus company had arrangements with some of these passengers. Or maybe the driver just let's people on and off for tips or just out out of the kindness of his heart. Weird..

Needless to say, we arrived in Sucre at 7:00 AM in a zombified state. We had a pretty good breakfast at our hotel and that put us right for a while.

そしてスクレといえば恐竜博物館！
スクレ郊外で恐竜の足跡が何千と発掘されしかも壁みたいに垂直に立っている！これはプレート同士が衝突したときに足跡が残された地面が持ち上げられ垂直になったらしいです。あと草食動物は4つずつのまとまり、肉食動物は前足が超小さくて手みたいだから2つずつのまとまりで足跡が残っています。ここは南米大陸にいた恐竜を中心に展示していて、北アメリカ出身のティラノサウルスより大きい肉食恐竜(名前忘れた・・;)の骨のレプリカが展示されていました。

T-Rex !

Can you see dinosours´ footprints?

We walked around the town, checking out the pretty colonial buildings in the central plaza and looking for the Dino Bus (turns out the bus doesn't run on Sunday - in fact, most museums, travel agencies and some restaurants were closed too). So, we took a cab to the Creatious Park.

The story goes like this. A cement company was caving away at a hill and ran into a gypsum rich layer of sediment. Not wanting to change the mix of their product, they avoided the layer and dug elsewhere. Soon after, the rain started to peel apart the sediment revealing a harder layer... filled with dinosaur foot prints! Today they have an impressive museum / theme park where you can see the massive surface jutting out of the nearby quarry at a 70 degree angle. Our guide explained how the surface used to be a dry lake bed, now pushed up at an extreme angle by the rising Andes mountains. They had some casts of the footprints at the museum and some very impressive life-sized dinosaurs models too. You can no longer get close to the wall as tourist once could, and they are currently battling an erosion problem. But this was a fun stop. On our guides advice, we waited until midday to see the shadows put some contrast on the 30 or so clear tracks across the wall. So cool.

夜はボリビア、メキシコ、イタリアなど色々な国の料理があるレストランへ。この時点でまだボリビア料理というものを食べていなかったので、3種類のボリビア料理が食べれるやつを注文◎料理の内容は、チョリソー、赤いソースで絡めた豚肉の塊、中にチーズを入れておにぎりみたいに丸めて焼いたマッシュポテト。めちゃ量多かった。。特にジャガイモの量が。サイドでもマッシュポテトついてるし・・！マイクと2人でシェアして良かったです。そしてチョリソーめちゃ美味しかったです)^-^(

Three kinds of traditional Bolivian dishes

We ate some good food in Sucre too, though I hesitate to recommend any restaurants as I got seriously ill from eating at one of these places (maybe).

City Hall in Sucre