Sucre

Expect: Gorgeous white colonial buildings, cobbled streets, genteel charm and some crazy nights.

Pack: Water, camera; just the usual party/tourist combo I suppose.  

Sucre

Bolivia's second capital is a colonial gem of whitewashed tranquillity. Grand, colonial facades open up onto breezy plazas; where locals and tourists sit reading the paper, playing chess or just taking in the afternoon sun. Students hang in the dingy bars and eateries, hidden behind narrow doors on the streets around the city's historical university. I arrived days before Christmas and watched the city embrace the festive season with emotional panache. Lights of red and green haloed the plaza, while ladies with coloured ponchos and weathered faces handed out sweets and cookies. On Christmas Day the streets rushed with smiling children and worried parents, as a few local businesses showed their Christmas spirit by giving away free toy cars and Barbie dolls.

Sucre is Bolivia's 'historic city' par excellence, and the people are a proud one as a result. Morales' apparent attempts to strip the city of its 'capital' status have been received with marked indignation. As locals will no doubt remind you, it was in Sucre that the continent's struggle for independence was both started and completed. In 1809, South America's first Grito Libertario (Cry for Freedom) rose from Sucre, and sixteen years later it was in this city's remarkable Casa de La Libertad (House of Freedom) that Simon Bolivar signed the nation's constitution; a flick of the wrist that not only sealed Bolivia's independence but marked the end of Spanish colonial rule anywhere on the continent. The country (Bolivia) would later be named after Latin America's great liberator.      

You can mull over the capital's role in Latin America's history as you sip a cappuccino in any number of busy cafés, and watch this mesmerising city go about its day. Nights can get pretty wild at Joy Ride or Florin; Sucre's two main travellers haunts. Quick tip; don't buy the "Cohibas" at Florin, they might be cheap but they're also fake and don't burn. Also don't be afraid to break out of the gringo cage and rip it up with the local students in all kinds of dingy dives. These often resemble more a garage sale than a bar; with peeling pool tables, London phone boxes and rusting Vespas all piled in. The artistic initiatives of the owners or the late-night escapades of student-magpies?, you decide. 

Visiting the dinosaur tracks outside Sucre is the perfect excursion for a hangover day. Get the bus that leaves three times a day from the main square and check out supposedly the most extensive set of intact dino-footprints in the world. Some people stare in awe at these enormous tracks passing across the hillside; others (perhaps the more hungover) point to the nearby cement factory and the distance at which your made to view the prints, and suggest "you know it really wouldn't be that hard to make these prints yourself".