Tarija
Friday, June 22nd, 2007Tarija is the Bolivian wine making capital, hence why we were visiting, and it was a really lovely city. Clean and sunny with leafy plazas and nice cafe´s all around, it was more like Argentina than what we had been expecing from Bolivia. We had arrived on a Saturday afternoon so pretty mich everything was closed, but we managed to arrange a tour of the bodegas for the Monday afternoon and then spent the rest of the weekend just relaxing and watching the world go by and exploring the city.
Turns out the town was holding a conference for all of the South American leaders the following tuesday so the town was filled with preparations and activities. On the monday morning there was a exhibition in the main square with dancers from every area of Bolivia giving colourful displays, it was wonderful to watch.
In the evenings there were some lovely restaurants around the main square to enjoy and we sampled the local wine and beer (both very nice actually) together with some great Mexican food – very traditional. There was also a suprisingly good museum run by the university, with a huge selection of dinasaur bones found in the area, under someones patio. Suprising but really interesting.
Monday afternoon then, we took a tour to four of the local Bodegas. The tours were in Spanish but we managed to understand most things and there was the all important tastings. At the firs place we tried Singani, the Bolivian spirit mafde from distilled white wine. We tried it neat from the barrel and it nearly killed us, think it is much better served with lemon and soda like a pisco sour.
The last Bogeda we visited was a small artisanal place and I think they were rather fond of sampling their own wares, the place was a mad house and I´m not sure they were the finest wines, but it was definately the most entertaining bodega we have visited. We had no idea what we were trying by the end of things but the driver joined in and we all had a great time!
Back in Tarija we had to dash to catch our overnight bus to Tupiza at 7:00, we nearly missed it too, not beacuse we were´t there in time but because we refused to believe the stinky, rickety thing in front of us was our bus. But is was, and what followed was 10 hours of freezing stinking horribleness, only broken by a 30 minute vreak in the middle of nowhere for “dinner”. We didn´t eat but sat and shiverred on the bus until 4am when we arrived in Tupiza. Note, Bolivian busses are cold and have no lighting so are therefore dull too cos you can´t read. They also smell really bad and are prone to break down. Oh, where was my taxi toting Bishop that night!
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