On the Road Again

It was a rough transition to start traveling again after being "settled" in Cochabamba for over 4 months. We started our last month of traveling by going to the beautiful city of Sucre, Bolivia. There is a strict building code in downtown Sucre and it feels very much like a Spanish colonial city...beautiful white washed building (see photo above). It is the "true" capital of Bolivia according to the constitution...something they are quite proud of. One of the guides at a musuem we visited said that Sucre is the only capital of Bolivia, but it just so happens that the president lives in La Paz, the congress meets in La Paz, and all the foriegn embassies are in La Paz. Rather confusing...as is most of the history of Bolivia.

While in Sucre we experienced our first robbery...but not from a common criminal. The Bank of Bolivia ATM (oldest bank in the country) refused to give us our money...but still deducted it from our account. In our attempt to rectify the problem we go to the bank, wait for over 40 minutes for someone to tell us that we have to go to another obscure office that is in charge of all ATM transactions. After two attempts we find the place...down an alleyway to an unmarked office in what looked like an abandoned building. Of course no one is there because it is 1:30pm...we still forget that everthing shuts down between 12;00pm and 2;30pm. We return in the afternoon and encounter a woman working way in the back of the office. At her desk are no less than five phones all with different colors of tape on the receiver (black, gold, red, etc.) and approxiametly 15 old computers and servers stacked in random corners of the room. We explain our problem and give her our debit card, which she uses to pull up all our atm withdrawls in the past few days. Under the one in question it says "hardware malfunction". She will write VISA who will contact the Bank of America, who will write her back and some how we will get our money back. We can now claim we have seen the interworkings of VISA transactions in a foriegn country. ...Compared to the 10 minute call we made to our bank today in which we were told the money would be credited to our account by tomorrow...some things are more effecient in the US!