One thing I took away from the month we spent in Bolivia is that they’re a very proud and patriotic people. Evo Morales, their current president, is loathed in Washington because he continually refuses to take loans and give away the country’s resources in exchange for perks and bribes like so many other Latin American leaders have done over the course of the past 50 years. His people seem to be very proud of him for that stance, and Bolivia may be better off for it.
We were fortunate enough to be in Sucre for Bolivia’s independence day celebrations. Sucre was one of the first cities to gain independence from Spain, in 1825, and it’s citizens are very proud of that. That pride showed in the three days of celebrations.
The start of one of the many marching bands parading through the city to mark the celebrations.
This long procession wound past our campground. We could hear it, and ran down the street to watch.
We got to visit Sucre’s Liberty Bell, which features its very own crack.
Sucre is famous as the “White City.”
Sucre had a great central market, featuring fruit from the jungle regions of the country and eggs and cheese from the highlands.
Quinn found this fuzzy caterpillar in our campground. At first I thought he was going to eat it like a brochette!
One of the city’s many plazas hosted a pick-up soccer game on a Friday afternoon.
We departed Sucre for Potosi on Saturday. Potosi is a silver mining town with a long history, having supplied Spain with silver since the 1500s. The Spanish crown set up a mint soon after the silver was discovered, and the coins produced there became the world’s first international currency. The museum showed the entire history of making coins from the early crude hand-stamped coins up through the modern techniques employed before the mint was finally closed in the 1950s.
The mint mark for the Potosi mint was a P, T, S, and i superimposed on each other. According to our guide, this is where our modern $ symbol originates.
This complex wooden gearing is a mule-driven press dating back 250 years. It’s still in the same location as when it was constructed.
Potosi is still a mining town today.
From Potosi we headed southwest toward the dusty outpost of Uyuni, gateway to the famous salt flats that bear it’s name and have the distinction of being the flattest place on earth. On the way we stopped to visit another ghost town, again complete with rusting locomotives.
Just outside of Uyuni is a locomotive graveyard, a must-see attraction for us. It was pretty surreal, and we spent the afternoon exploring the wrecks. We even decided to camp among the rusting hulks.
No safety rules here. We could climb around on the rusting locomotives to our heart’s content.
The setting sun amongst the aging giants made for a spectacular sight.
We enjoyed a full moon camped in the desert.
Great post Witt, thanks for the update. HTS
Ahh..no safety rules. I’m ever more convinced that we are much less “free” in America than we like to think we are.
I completely agree. We’ve put in place so many rules and laws to keep us safe that we’ve lost some of the self-reliance that we had, say 100 or even fifty years ago. That ethos is still a very strong part of our culture, thought even though it’s now partially an illusion.
I was talking with a mountain biking guide in Peru about this. He was educated and lived in the town of Huaraz all of his life. He was complaining about the haphazard nature of development there – houses could be built anywhere with no safety standards. Often someone would start building and inadvertently undermine the house uphill of theirs!
So then I told him about all of the regulations that we have in the states, from zoning to building codes and even homeowners associations in individual neighborhoods. I think he was kind of surprised that in the land of the free we’re really not all that free in some respects.
Thanks for commenting!