The start of my Bolivian trip is in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. What images spring to mind of Bolivia? High Andes, women in huge wide skirts with beautiful embroidery, llamas, salt flats? Is it this?

Or this?

Yes this is Bolivia too – welcome to the Equipetrol district and to Santa Cruz, the biggest city in Bolivia (3 million people out of a country of 11 million) and at the foot of the Andes and the edge of the Amazon basin.

Having arrived in the horrid early hours of Friday morning, after a brutal flight which took off at 1am and landed at 4, I’d got some sleep in the hotel and then staggered out into the humid air to clear my head. I quickly found that I was walking around with a permanently dropped jaw as I walked through luxury shopping and residential areas. There are some very lovely streets indeed, made of up big houses and luxury apartments.

There are also astonishingly expensive shops and restaurants to choose from. I gave way to an elegant woman leaving a shop (that sells Cartier) who looked like she was about to go to lunch in Cannes. I passed women walking down the street with open handbags, that any able pickpocket could have helped themselves from. I walked with people who had expensive headphones on, their phones out and were reading or looking at maps without a care in the world. These people were not worried about crime.

And I passed grand university buildings and exclusive private schools – and learnt that there are strong German connections to Bolivia, so just like there are British private schools in many South American countries, in Bolivia there are German ones.

It has to be said that this is not what I was expecting and from a bit of quick reading, it is clearly not typical of the whole country. This is a very wealthy part of Bolivia, which is a poor country – so I expect to see some very different places. However, after Santiago and being surprised at how it is at the moment, Santa Cruz is also a complete surprise, a contrast and a nice place to be.