Che Guevara

The flight to Santa Cruz was very straight forward i was disappointed / relieved to discover. I was called a military airline but looked and felt like a commercial one. The only difference was that there was no security procedures, no x-rays or searches, nothing! In the west we can learn from that, as it meant that queues were none existent.

The spot where Che´s luck ran out

It only took a 30 minute flight to get well and truely off the Gringo trail. I got into the city, and found there was no tourists, no tourist facilities and so consequently nothing to do. Santa Cruz is a big commercial hub, an attractive looking city that felt nothing like the rest of Bolivia. The chaos in the streets was absent, it didn´t look like a Bolivian town, it is obviously affluent and even the people looked different - more Brazilian than Indian.

I decided very quickly to head to Saimapata, a town a few hours away that i had heard you could book

Laundry table Che´s body was displayed

trips to the nearby Amboro National Park. I went out to eat and bumped into an unfortunate Irish girl (the only other tourist i met) who had been stuck there a week waiting for a road north to open.
The next day i took the Sucre bus which stopped in Samapaita on the way. I justified my decision to fly the reverse route because the bus was in an atrocious condition, seats missing etc, and the window next to me was stuck open so i was happy i wasn´t having to spend 15 hours on it heading all the way to Sucre.

Samaipata was a lovely little town, but i had the same problem that there wasn´t any tourists. Tours to the

Site of Che grave next to Vallegrande airfield

park would have run only for my benefit and cost 100GBP a day in spanish only, which i didn´t want to do. The only tour running the next day (i tried every agency) was a Che Guevara tour. Che spent his last days in southern Bolivia running from the CIA (who didn´t want him overthrowing South American governments as he had done in Cuba) and Bolivian army before being caught and executed for treason. I had the t-shirt a while ago and have read a couple of books by him, so i am pretty interested in him.

It was an expensive and a long day but very interesting. We visited the canyon where he was chased and

Site Che was executed

caught (large memorial marks the spot), the old school building he was executed along with a couple of comrades (full of messages down with imperialism / long live che / love letters to him from confused angry teens etc etc) and the grave where he was dumped anonymously in a military airfield along with several others before being exhumed 30 years later by a Cuban delegation.

There was a German guy with us called Stephan. I had discussed with him on the way my admiration for Germans and the way they travel so extensively so wasn´t surprised that the only other tourist in Samaipata was German, so imagine my amusement when i found out a girl named Tanya buried alongside Che was second generation German...........see! they get everywhere even south american revolutionary groups..........