The Teleférico is a cable railway that connects La Paz and El Alto city. La Paz is in a valley. El Alto is in the high plateau above La Paz. For many years people would take buses or minibuses to travel between the two cities. The trip would take about 20-30 min. Today with the teleférico the trip takes 10 min and the view of the city is spectacular! We all enjoyed the trip today. The kids were amazed at the size of the city.
La Paz and nothing else is what people who love this city would say. This is where I was born and grew up. La Paz is the second capital of Bolivia, the executive and legislative branches are in this city. Sucre is the judicial capital. I grew up three blocks from Plaza Murillo, the main square in La Paz. Congress and the Presidential Palace are on this Plaza. The streets where I walked during the day were always buzzing with people. How different is the upbringing of my kids in a suburbun area of Jacksonville where they hardly see people on the streets. I want our kids to experience and enjoy the things I did as a little girl, and feeding the pigeons in Plaza Murillo was one of them. The pigeons are very friendly to the point of climbing onto your hand.
The castle of the Glorieta is a beautiful building in the outskirts of Sucre. It was the home of Francisco and Clotilde Argandoña. They were given nobility titles of prince and princess by Pope León XIII for their work with orphans. Mr. Argandoña owned silver and gold mines. The beautiful building, built in the late 1800s, has gothic, barroque, neoclassic and mudéjar styles. Unfortunately, the only heir left Bolivia for a few months, and during that time the castle was ransacked. Today just a few pieces of funiture remain.
There are three things I liked the most in this Park:
1. Titanosaurus, which is the biggest dinosaur found in the world. The model of this dinosaur is the biggest in the world, more than a 100 feet tall!
2. The dinosaur footprints on the cliff. I saw them clearly through the binoculars.
3. The playground was awesome. There was a super fast slide, and we dug out a fake fossil.
We are having a memorable lunch overlooking the main square in Sucre. Lawrence got Chorizo Chuquisaqueño (sausage from this area). Claudia got picante de lengua(spicy cow tongue). The kids got chicken cordon bleu and pork chops. We all enjoyed our food mucho!! Delicious!
Picture this massive cliff covered with dinosaur tracks, to be precise 5055 tracks of at least 8 species. This is what you see in the Cretaceous Park. The original name for this park is Cal Orck'o (in Quechua it means limestone cliff.) The cliff is 1500 meters long and 110 meters high.
The park has also life size replicas of dinosaurs in South America. One of the most outstanding is titanosaurus, the largest replica of the world. The kids loved seeing the carnotaur, the ankylosaurus, and others. Victoria will write later about a tour we took to get a closer look at the tracks.
My mom and I took a tour to see the dinosaur tracks up close. There was a steep, narrow way leading downward. We stopped on the way and the guide explained the different kinds of tracks. There were differences between carnivores and herbivores. We could get up to 3 meters close to the huge cliff. We saw mostly herbivore tracks, which looked like circles. The there eight sets ofrece tracks going in the same direction through the whole cliff!
The first picture shows the cliff. The second shows the footprints of Titanosaurus up close. This was just an amazing experience!
