It felt heavenly to wake up in a comfortable bed, clean from a proper shower, with the sunlight shining through the windows announcing good weather and the local market giving us prospects of a tasty breakfast. Although I no longer instantly get gag reflexes every time I eat oats with protein powder and water, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s simply no pleasant breakfast. In my case, it still doesn’t go down easily.

The morning would be a slow one today. We only had 40 km left until Cochabamba so we could afford a slow start which was good, because this way we could wait for our laundry to dry completely, Jacques had time to make an important call home, and could go to the hospital to get his stitches removed.

Göran and I bought fresh bread, eggs, vegetables and watermelon at the market and turned it into a tasty breakfast of seasoned fried eggs on fresh bread with lettuce and tomato as well as watermelon on the side. A tasty nourishing breakfast. All in all our slow morning meant that we left the hostal around 11 AM and town around 20 min later. What took us so long? The doctor had prescribed antibiotics for Jacques to prevent infection of his wounds and picking them up from the pharmacy took that long. The pharmacy was only 2 min from our hostal so what inner workings they had that made them take so incredibly long to fetch the pills is beyond me.

When we finally cycled we had a good pace and stopped in Vinto for lunch around 1 PM and had already covered more than half the distance to Cochabamba. Lunch was surprisingly tasty with a good soup as starter and a savoury lentil stew with potatoes and rice as main dish accompanied by cinnamon water as drink (sounds weird but is really good!) and for dessert we got a cup of what Germans call “Wackelpudding”. A sweet gelatinous, glibbery pudding. I didn’t eat mine, but Göran was more than happy to munch two.

Although we had to cycle through a lot of traffic after that, it was far better than the terrible circumstances we had to brave in El Alto a few hours later. The vegetation we passed along the way was all pleasantly green and varied, partially blooming with bright colourful flowers and a beautiful reminder of how nice it was to be out of the Altiplano as well. The houses we passed were partially much more beautiful as well (for Bolivian standards). Common houses usually had a few nice details and a lick of colour which is something you don’t see that often around here. But among the normal and prettier houses stood some large villas as well. All in all you could tell that Cochabamba was an economically stronger region and its looks reminded us of Indonesia a bit.

We found a charming hostal where we had a cozy room, each of us our own bed, and even a small balcony and private bathroom. That alone was perfect but the owner, Luis, was such a warm, kind and genuine person that he also did a great deal in making the place a nice temporary home. They even had a washing machine we could use free of charge 😮

That evening we treated ourselves to a restaurant dinner. We cycled there by bike and enjoyed the holiday feeling the cozy creative restaurant and the good food were giving us. We had nachos with guacamole (and in the men’s case also cheese sauce and chili con carne loaded) nachos as a starter and hamburgers with fries as our main dish. Everything was truly delicious and added to the vacational feeling even more. What a nice feeling to be out of the Altiplano!

We sat there for a while, chatting, having drinks, eating our food and looking back on our adventure so far. We were happy and we were proud. This really was the perfect evening and thank you to Jacques, for treating us to this delicious meal! 🙂
It was the perfect ending to a very nice day.