Sucre Santa Cruz and the Death Train

The Lonely plant Guide has a habit of using the adjective "death" when describing certain activities and places in South America...Death Road...Death Train and i wanted to check out the later, being a bit of an anorak an all.

To get there from Potosi (sothern Bolivia), where I parted from Richard and Anika (thanks guys for some great travelling, see you in London next year) I travelled to Sucre for a couple of days, the capital of Bolivia, although the Presidencial Palace is in La Paz. Sucre is a pretty little colonial town with some attractive archtecture but not a great deal to keep anyone there. I did bump into a French guy I had met in Uyuni and we crashed a student end of term party so fun was had.

From Sucre i needed to travel to Santa Cruz to join "The Death" train, so called as it takes over 20 hours to cross the Chao region of Bolivia to the border with Brazil, a distance of around 400KM.

So another uncomfortable night bus via mud roads and I was is the steamy town of Santa Cruz. It was a bit of a shock actually as its very western by Bolivian standards, there's even a branch of Benetton there.

Santa Cruz is the centre of the oil producing region of Bolivia and very rich in comparison, so much so that the area wants some form of independance from the rest of the country and as part of the protest the inhabitants of the city staged a one day strike which co-incided with my second day there. The streets where empty so I spent my day sun bathing and watching the locals play football, bit like a sumers days on Finsbury Park.

And so it came time to leave Santa Cruz and join the "Death Train". You can't buy tickets in advance only on the day of departure when qeues (sp) reach Cuban proportions, I was down at the station by 7 a.m. by which time there were already around 100 people in front of me, by the time the office opened there wre around 200 behind me!

It will come as know surprise to most of you that far from finding the journey a chore i actually enjoyed spending over 20 hours on a train. It operated rather like a local bus, stopping in every little comunity it passed to pick up and set down passengers freight and live stock. On each occasion seamingly the whole town came out to feed and water us passengers and the food was very good.

So we chugged on through Menonite communities, Canadians who had come down in the early 1900s to farm the area, the gene pool dosen't appear to have developed since, they al looked very similar and the fringes of rain forest to arive at the Brazilian boredr at 11 a.m. around 4 hours late, no passengers charter here though.

Tired but strangely happy i made my way into Brazil for a short two day hop through Corumba (the deadest town ever where the only other English speeking guy was a Greek vangrant) and Campo Grande where I bought some great flip flops on my way to Paraguay.

Pictures are:

Menonite farmers (spot the differences!)

The Death Train

Deserted Santa Cruz

Colonial Sucre