The Happy Abandon: Sucre

It's been far too long since we last wrote...by now we're on the beaches of Brazil drinking caipirinhas! We'll try to get you caught up here soon, but we can't move onto Brazil before writing about Sucre, a small city in Central/South Bolivia where we recently spent a couple weeks. It's been one of our favorite places that we've visited to date.

After spending the first month of our trip moving around quite a bit, and doing lots of touristy activities, it was really great to find a nice place to relax, get into some type of daily routine and not have to deal with packing and unpacking our backpacks every other day.

We stayed in a very nice hostel called La Dolce Vita where we had a big private room with bathroom for around $17/night. For the two weeks we were in Sucre, I took daily Spanish classes at a nearby language school and Jenny volunteered as an English teacher at a local elementary school.

We found Sucre to be a really clean, safe, friendly and authentic place to hang around for a while. With no major tourist attractions, Sucre isn’t a place that is very high on the list of most people who travel to South America, and it was nice to spend some time in a city that is not taken over by tourists (Cuzco, a place we really liked by the way, is a good example). Sucre, in short, ranks pretty high on the “realness” scale (more on this in a future post)!

Many of the other travelers that we met were in a similar position as we were – looking for a place to settle down for a couple or more weeks. Almost everyone at our hostel was sticking around for a week or more (both a sign of a great hostel and cool city) and most were either taking Spanish lessons or doing some type of volunteer work, and we enjoyed the chance to get to know some people for more than just a couple days at a time.

The Bolivian town of Tarabuco, a market town near Sucre that we visited one Sunday, is not known for their coffee...and in fact it tasted horrible. However it does make for a nice photo!