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<\/a>The start of one of the many marching bands parading through the city to mark the celebrations.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>This long procession wound past our campground. We could hear it, and ran down the street to watch.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>We got to visit Sucre’s Liberty Bell, which features its very own crack.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Sucre is famous as the “White City.”<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Sucre had a great central market, featuring fruit from the jungle regions of the country and eggs and cheese from the highlands.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Quinn found this fuzzy caterpillar in our campground. At first I thought he was going to eat it like a brochette!<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>One of the city’s many plazas hosted a pick-up soccer game on a Friday afternoon.<\/p><\/div>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/a>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.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>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.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/a>Potosi is still a mining town today.<\/p><\/div>\n
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.<\/p>\n