Heavily laden with wine from Tarija, we arrived back in Sucre to be welcomed back by the sight of our 2ft Christmas Tree in the apartment.

T'was the night before Christmas and all through the ..city people were running around doing last minute Christmas shopping - no new experience there. We battled through the crowds to ensure we didn't miss out on buying one of Sucre's finest frozen chickens from SAS supermarket together with all the trimmings. We also needed to buy each other presents. We set ourselves a princely limit of B$50 (just under a fiver) and found some bargains in the market.

Sophie took time in the afternoon to prepare the spiced red cabbage with port for the next day's big meal. Then we went out to our favourite Gringo joint, JoyRide Cafe, for a classic Christmas Eve burger and a few beers. A candle-lit procession to the cathedral passed by the window of the cafe and we followed on to attend Midnight Mass. We sat in the cathedral, as a stray dog took refuge under our pew, and realised we were surrounded by a large number of people cradling a baby Jesus doll - a bit strange. A tradition in Bolivia, apparently, is that people bring their doll along to the service and then care for it the rest of the year - not sure what that involves or whether they nail it to a cross at Easter . The music and the lights on the Altar during Mass seemed straight out of Star Wars but it was a nice service and the congregation were very welcoming.

Christmas Day arrived and we christened it with a glass of high-altitude sparkly. Presents were exchanged and Sophie was delighted to receive her 'Recuerdo de Bolivia' handbag and mini-multi sports set (golf, table-tennis, badminton), which entertained us for the morning and morphed into indoor hockey by the afternoon.

We enjoyed our Christmas Dinner, which included a starter of prawns from Lake Titicaca and a roast chicken which we managed somehow to cook in a very basic Bolivian oven with no temperature settings. We took a stroll up to La Recoleta Mirador for a beer as the sunset and finished a lovely day by watching Home Alone.

With no time to hang about and with no effects of Salmonella evident, we took the night bus to La Paz (12 hours) after a leisurely Boxing Day.