There are a number of National Parks in Bolivia – all offering beautiful landscapes and all worthy of visiting. But there’s only one with more than 2,500 dinosaur footprints! Reportedly the most important paleontological site in Latin America Torotoro is the smallest of Bolivia’s national parks and with landscapes that could be straight out of the Lion King, who wouldn’t want to visit?

Things to know before you go:

• Entry to the park costs 100 bs ($14.50) which gets you a four day pass.

• You must be accompanied by a guide within the park. The cost for the guide is fixed, depending on whether you are doing a full or half day activity, but can be split by up to six people.

• The guides don’t speak English.

• It takes at least four hours to get there, mostly on a gravel, bumpy road from Cochabamba.

Access

Unless you’re in the market for a private transfer, you’ve got two options to access the park – public bus, departing once per day, six days per week (23bs), or by minivan (35bs) which depart more regularly, but not until a minimum number of seats have been filled. More details about the transport here: https://wikitravel.org/en/Torotoro_National_Park

We opted for the minivan, arriving at the stop at 7.10am and were waiting nearly two hours for the van to fill (in September, the low season) and ended up splitting the cost of the last seat with some other travellers so we could get moving.

The journey was slow, bumpy and had many stops but for the last two hours at least had some interesting scenery.

After dumping our gear at a hostel we headed straight to the park office to purchase our entry ticket then went two doors down to organise an afternoon tour.

Canyon Tour

Thankfully we had no problem finding two other couples to do the four hour canyon tour which was the most economic option to split the guide fee of 160bs.

After a short drive through rocky, dry but ogle-worthy terrain, we walked more than 900 stairs down into the dramatic ravine.

We swam – briefly! - in the unexpectedly cold river running through the canyon before hiking up to a mirador to see vultures circling the valley as the sun set.

Our swimming hole

On our hike back to the car we walked through dry riverbeds and our guide showed us dinosaur footprints from 82-65 million years ago. It really wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine raptors running amok on this crazy landscape.

The footprints of a diplodocus

*commences Jurassic Park movie marathon*