Deeper Underground

I´m finally back to comfort and ease of the tourist trail. I´ve come to miss Australians. In my hostel in Sucre, they are abundant.

I´m spending the morning on the roof terrace, enjoying the Australian twang in the hot sun, and trying to dry out a watch that wasn´t designed for swimming.

Sucre´s centre is pretty, though not shockingly so. Farther out from the centre, most of the buildings look shabbily stuck together, and often half complete. Everything seems busy in anticipation of tomorrow´s celebration. I think it´s Bolivian Independance day. The highlight of the walk is another game of "What´s that meat". I wonder, who would want to buy the nose and broken-off front half of a cow skull. I don´t know the answer, and I´m not going to keep an eye on it to find out. Elsewhere, there´s plenty of street food, so I enjoy a progressive lunch of an apple, an empanada, a kebab and a oily sausage bap. Where Paraguay was dirt cheap, Bolivia is filthy, dirt cheap. My lunch comes in at a little under two bucks fifty and the hostel dormitory is about six bucks a night.

In the evening, I join the gaggle of Australians in a kareoke bar. It´s a little like my old favourite at Liverpool St., Eat & Drink, but with the key difference that this one descends off the street into a sticky, ultra-violet lit, dungeon with a powerful odour of a cheap floral spray, presumably masking some worse scent. The Bolivians get through five or six songs. Even those that are sung well sound awful. The musical style is largely based on the MIDI technology of the late eighties, accompanied by generic music videos of desperate actors trying to look emotional. Earlier I had looked for a cheap dinner that wasn´t chips and fried chicken. As it stands, my stomach of chips and fried chicken demands to be laid down flat. I have to get out, even before we´ve sung our first gringo song.