Toro Toro

La Paz isn't much to speak of (not that my one night stopover gives me any authority on this) it's like a big armpit with markets and greasy burgers, so I hopped on a bus to Cochabamba where this deaf old man called Felix with egg on his face talked and talked at me the whole 8 hours about the doomed state of humanity and my appetite. When we finally arrived I pootled off asap but discovering I'd missed the last bus to The Land Before Time I resentfully guzzled some icky tripe'n'maize and bunked down in the bus terminal after convincing security I was a vulnerable penniless she-tourist. In the morning Felix was still outside.

A "short" (4hr) arse-slamming minivan ride later I was in Toro Toro which is where dinosaurs roamed 60-65 million years ago. The main square is tragically Jurassic Park'd up with fuzzy sound effects and the bricks on some houses accidentally have fossils on because they only realised this place was cool about 30 years ago. Huge rock formations, cataracts and geological colour gradients, scattered with dino bone fragments and Titanosaurus prints, labyrinthine limestone cave complexes where you struggle through stalactites and mites in the pitch black, and also pre-Inca cave paintings and PROPER majestic condors better than Colca. And my god the views. Unparalleled, had they not been tainted by the Frenchman behind me uttering endless sexist expletives to express his wonder.*

In fact I was the seule non-French human of a total 11. Also the only Spanish speaker, making me a massively incapable translator of Paleozoic and Cretaceous terminology. Worth it though for ten minutes of womb-like darkness and silence in a (so far) under-visited grotto.

Cinderella

I also met my first transvestite peasant lady, and non-hispanophone South Americans. I really need to learn Quechua. I only know "naked vagina" and "this is delicious".

*putain, enculée, so forth.