The plane to Santa Cruz was also late and the "VIP" gate lounge was small and hot, in due course we arrived in Santa Cruz Bolivia.
It started raining as my taxi left the airport. On arriving at the hostel I didn't get the type of accomodation I had booked and because the staff spoke only spanish, while I have a little Spanish I didn't have enough to argue but it was only one night and ok.
Next morning it was still raining off and on, but I went for a walk to the main square.
In A Bolivian city typically the main square has the Roman Catholic Cathedral on one side an the local and/ or regional govt buildings on the other sides - Govt buildings are usually painted white and are quite imposing buildings.
I was quite surprised by the Cathedral in Santa Cruz for many reasons; Inside it was quite bright and had a "light" feeling, totally unlike the quite dark and overwhelmingly ornate churches in Slovenia and other parts of Europe that I have visted.
The other surprising thing was that the songs they were singing were in an upbeat and modern tempo lead by a woman who started the service. While coming out of the exterior speakers of the cathedral were tracks from the album from an 11 year old gospel singer! Inside there was also a huge crucfix on the rh wall with a picture of Mary on one side and an unamed man on the other.
As I walked around I saw a number of cake shops with several large and brightly decorated cakes in them, clearly Bolivians have a sweet tooth. My friend tells me they can only make large fluffy sponge cakes. Santa Cruz is the largest city in Bolivia but it does have that run down look.
It was time to leave for the airport for my flight to Tarija - before I left Sydney my travel agent had told me that my later direct flight to Tarija had been cancelled and I had been booked on the flight that went via La Paz one of the capitals of Bolivia. I wasn't very happy about this because Santa Cruz is 94m above sea level and La Paz is 4000 m! the highest city airport in the world.
Ascending from sealevel to 4000 is no fun!
after we landed my hands and feet started to tingle like crazy and I started to feel terrible fortunately we didn't have to change planes and were soon off and decending again so I started to feel better fairly quickly.
There had been some severe turbulance on the way to La Paz but as we approached Tarija the turbulance became so severe that the pilot turned the plane and diverted to Cochabamba on landing the Hosties collected the sick bags from the several people that had used them. After 30 minutes of waiting on the ground the captain announced that we had to wait another mins for a decision from ground management about where our final destination would be.
I was hoping to stay at Cochabamba as it is only 2500m
But then came the BAD news. It was decided that we should go back to La Paz :(
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