Sucre, Bolivia

We fly to La Paz this afternoon, so we´re just waiting at our hotel in Sucre (Su Merced) with a couple hours to laze about.

We spent almost three full days in Sucre.  We saw most of the highlights, including all the major museums, art galleries and churches.  The centre is littered with museums and galleries, half of them not listed in the guide books, of which we stopped into a few.  One of the more interesting non-listed museums was the militiary museum.  It had lots of antique large cannons and guns, which neither of us had seen in real life before.

The weather in Sucre was very comfortable.  theweathernetwork.com had us thinking it was going to rain the whole time, but so far so good and no rain.  The temperature has been around 18C with cloudy periods.  At night it gets a bit chilly but we just needed our jackets.

Yesterday afternoon we were done with touristing and shopping, and so had a beer at the Plaza Restaurant, on the 2nd floor overlooking Plaza 25 de Mayo, and caught up on our reading.  It was a very relaxing place to spend an afternoon.

We found an excellent restaurant for dinner the first night, Tentanciones.  They had homemade tagliatelle with mushrooms, one of the best pasta dishes we´ve had.  We followed that with a cheese and meat platter.  The cheeses all came from Bolivia, I didn´t know they produced such a variety of cheeses.  The tagliatelle was so good we returned for lunch a couple days later and I ordered it again.

Aside from the lunch at Tentanciones, for lunches we´ve started having the ´menu´, which is a set menu of soup, main and dessert, usually under $5.  The soups are generally excellent, and it´s a good amount of food (nutritious too).  The set lunch at La Casona was only 25 Bs, about $3.50 (Heather had the set lunch -- I had a meat craving and so had the asado, which was pretty good for outside of Argentina).  We had it with a glass of house red (about $1).

The 2nd night we ate at La Taverne, a french restaurant inside Alliance Francais. The atmosphere was great, but we were disappointed with the food which was a bit bland. 

Last night we had dinner at El Huerto, a little out of the centro, so we took a taxi (10 Bs).  We were the only ones there at 8pm, and only one other couple showed up at 9pm.  We weren´t sure if this was normal, or maybe they were busy at other times of the day of week.  They were a tapas restaurant (which took us a bit of asking to figure out).  The kitchen was excellent, we particularly enjoyed the chicken brochettes and the panko shrimps.

Our hotel in La Paz offered airport pick-up for about the same price as a taxi, so we´ll have someone greeting us when we arrive after our 45 minute flight.  Whenever I´ve done this in the past my name has always been messed up so it will be interesting to see how they spell D´Souza.  Hopefully the driver will stop at the top of the altiplano before we descend into La Paz, so that I can take a picture.