The taste of Sucre

Apart from its world heritage colonial architecture, great museums, local tribal festivals with colourful costumes and creatacious dinosaur footprints, Sucre is first and foremost a great place to eat. Here is a quick guide to some dishes which are best bought at the roughest looking establishments in Sucre. You can tell you´re in dull tourist cafes when the staff outnumber the customers and you can hear yourself talking, so best avoid them.

Mondongo - Beef in a spicy red sauce with rice and potatoes. Best enjoyed at the market where you can argue about the price whilst eating it. Someone will offer you a selection of luminous drinks to accompany it.

Chorizo - Enormous deep fried chorizo with enough spicy juice to soak into any bread on the plate. Comes with some salad so you can pretend it´s a square meal as you crawl out of the restaurant sweating fat.

Churrasco - Marinaded chicken cooked to perfection in a kitchen that regularly catches fire whilst you´re waiting for your dish. Served with Papas Fritas (Chips) and a vegetable if you´re lucky.

Salteña - Basically a cornish pasty but a more spicy. The cheapest local snack and widely available from stalls.

You can also spot whether you´re in the right kind of restaurant by the obligatory poster of a semi-clad woman on the wall. As usual in Latin America, this is advertising something unrelated to women´s underwear, such as a concrete company, oil refinery etc.. Sucre is also the first place I have ever seen both pornography and dinosaurs on the same advertisement - very innovative.

The market also stocks a wide selection of cakes for desert, should you wish to induce a heart attack.

If you don´t like the food (?) then you can go and see the dinosaurs. Here is one being incubated in the museum.

The dinosaur prints were discovered after the limestone behind the cement works was quarried, revelaing a fault line that used to be the bank of a tropical sea. Dinosaur trails over a hundred meters long are visible on the wall. Of as much interest though are the dinosaur models and sound effects all around the park.

As part of the world heritage site rules, everyone in Sucre has to paint their building white. Also, unike most other towns in Bolivia, the buildings are generally finished. Both rarities make the town very nice to walk around. I took some photos but had to delete the ones inside the Bank of Bolivia, as they assumed I would be coming back to rob the place later.

The highlight of our visit to Sucre was a local festival in Tarabuco, 2 hours outside the town. Tarabuco folk are famous for their woven clothes and dancing, and everyone from around the region gets together to dance, play traditional music, talk Quechua and drink Chicha (yellow maize wine). The male dancers wear large spurs on their boots that resemble circular saw blades and make a lot of noise. These are best avoided after too much Chicha.

Lou also had her fortune told by a lady and her two canaries. The canaries pick cards from the drawer under their cage, and reveal , very generally, your future. What a privilage for only 10p.