PotosiPotosiPotoseeeeeeee

Spare polka dots for the background

Weary wanderers have returned. They say the best part of any journey is coming home. The best part of coming home for me is definitely not having to cocoon myself from the filth of a random bed in my far from unfilthy itself sleeping bag.

So I’m gonna throw up some photos and words to complete the tales of our adventures. The laptop died in Bolivia and left me with the choice of endeavouring to continue the updates but with exponentially more hardship - blogging in Bolivia is bad buzz, or taking a holiday from the blog altogether. I chose the easier option as usual. So some of the words were written already and recovered kicking and screaming from the belly of my comatose laptop. Some of it will be entirely from memory and given my far from reliable recollective abilities please don’t expect factual accuracy.

We left Uyuni and its one solitary ATM which was out of service the morning we were leaving and as a result we had to promise the owners of Tonito hotel that we’d get them the $30 we owed them as soon as we got to La Paz. But they’d have to wait until after Potosi and we jumped on a minibus run by the equivalent of Fennells or Behans or Rickys – the kind of company whose bread and butter is ferrying revellers to remote dens of iniquity at all hours of the morning - outside the town at 10am to bring us there. Buses in Bolivia are incredibly adhoc affairs. They’re generally very old minibuses imported either semi or completely clapped out from Japan, the steering wheels ripped out and sellotaped to the left hand side and a furry dashboard and a Child of Prague installed while they’re at it. Generally there’s a gaudy mural of Jesus or a beatific Llama on the back and the dodgiest of Bolivian folk music blaring out the windows. Bolivia definitely wins the prize for the worst indigenous music. But again, it was so bad as to be almost endearing.

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

The bus we took through the desert up into the mountains to Potosi had no air conditioning and cling film on the seats to protect the beautiful upholstery from the buckets of airborne dust kicked up during this and countless previous journeys. This combination of events lead to an incredibly sweaty 6 hour spin. The buses very rarely leave on time, each time the driver goes to pull out a woman in a bolar hat with a hundred-weight of randomness and a couple of swaddled babbies on her back appears out of the dust demanding to be let on the bus before it embarks. Then when the bus finally gets going, it stops at random intervals to pick up or let off these enterprising women to sell their wares to God knows who in the middle of God knows where – I’d say even God would need SatNav to find one of these ladies if he needed some half cooked llama meat in a hurry.


But interestingly no piss stops. So you had a situation where every time the bus would stop to pick up a passenger there’d be a rush by several incontinent German girls (Cabáistes) to the door to slash against a wall or behind a bush. The driver had no qualms about leaving people behind if they couldn’t close the deal quick enough. Bolivia’s international initials are BO and by jaysus did we know it on that bus. These colourful indigenous ladies with their blanket fulls of half baked goods travel in packs between towns and all the unfortunate outposts in between to sell their wares. One woman, a late arrival who had previously been sitting on the floor in the drivers compartment almost under the steering wheel was ushered into the passenger compartment the instant a seat became free. Within seconds we knew why. The bang of benjy humming from her every pore made our heads spin and the driver obviously felt it was affecting his ability to drive. This was pure, concentrated body odour from years of water and soap avoidance. This woman was like a black hole of hygiene, her filthy gnarled feet wouldn’t look out of place attached to a freshly excavated mummified Cro-Magnon man - or woman. Time to stop inhaling through your nose again – I did a lot of that in sunny BO which is extremely debilitating when the air is as thin as it is. But we survived as usual dining on a full packet of half melted “Kukys” (A Bolivian trademarked brand of chocolate chip cookies) and arrived in Potosi in the afternoon.

More random business hours you will not find

We’d gone from Uyuni at 3653m elevation to Potosi at 4090m a gain of over 400m. People in Bolivia, especially the lightweight gringos, are obsessed with altitude and talk about it like we talk about the price of houses or the traffic at home. It’s pretty important to keep track though as if you’re prone to a bout of altitude sickness it will effect your respiratory and digestive experience, not to mention your ever sensitive zen, drastically.

Potosi is a mining town with a fascinating but deeply troubled history. It was founded sometime in the mid 1500s specifically to exploit the rich reserves of silver discovered in the towering Cerro Rico the mountain on whose banks the town was formed. This remote mining outpost became the richest city in the world for a period during the 17th century so deep were its reserves of valuable silver. But these riches came at an extraordinary cost in human life. It is estimated that the Spanish put 12 million souls to work in the mines, some pulled from the indigenous population, the majority of them made up from slaves from the Congo but all of them working under the tyranny of forced labour. Over the course of the next 200 years, depending on which historical estimates you believe, between 5 and 9 million souls perished in the mines due primarily to the extremely harsh conditions but also due to the excessive exposure to the poisonous mercury which was used in the silver ore process. Workers were sent underground for periods of 6 months at a time and if they survived the incredible hardship, ended up blind when they resurfaced. There’s a saying that the Spanish could have built a bridge of silver from Potosi to Madrid. The locals have modified the saying slightly to say that they could also have built a bridge of bones. Potosi in it's heyday was more affluent than Paris or London. I met a Norwegian journalist who was working on the theory that the vast reserves of silver plundered from Potosi by the Spanish underpinned the entire European Industrial Revolution. While the silver deposits were depleted long ago, the mines are still worked to this day by Bolivians who lease the mines from the Government and work in small fragmented co-operatives to eke whatever living they can from the minerals (tin, copper, zinc) painstakingly extracted from the mountain.

A relatively tame bus mural - Potosi

We took another Torture Tourism Tour down into the mines for a full day and will never forget it. First we took a trip to get kitted out with helmets, battery packs, headlamps, wellies and overalls. Then, kitted out like Bob the Builder Gringoes we wandered the town market to pick up supplies for ourselves but also presents or offerings to the miners for allowing us to come and watch them work. These presents included cocoa leaves (the raw material for cocaine) which these guys chew incessantly, washed down with cheap and sugary fizzy drinks. Preparing round meals in a square hole, a dark tunnel hundreds of feet below the ground is problematic. So the miners forego the luxury of proper food for the more convenient short term energy boosts which Cocoa and Fanta provide. Their colourfully rotten teeth tell their own story. We also bought bottles of 96% proof alcohol – every Friday afternoon the miners, ranging in age from 12 to 62 congregate at an underground temple devoted to their underground god - a very well-hung derivative of Satan as far as I could figure out - and drink to his and their good health. Interestingly they have other gods for when they’re above ground, gods who hang out in the sky and give light and heat but not the all important mineral wealth. And the final and most interesting gifts we bought were sticks of dynamite. Dynamite is legal in Bolivia. It’s sold (in Potosi anyways) on the side of the street or in special miner’s markets which are open to the public. The majority of the miners still use the very primitive method of hand drilling holes and inserting and detonating sticks of dynamite to make progress further down into the earth’s core and to hopefully rich deposits of valuable minerals. So with pure alcohol and dynamite as gifts (these guys don’t fuck around) we took the minibus up to the entrance of the mine we’d be exploring for the rest of the day. Our guide Pedro was a small, chatty and cheeky ex-miner who escaped a life of misery by becoming a guide. It has to be said that the miners earn on average twice what a general worker earns and are very well respected locally. This doesn’t make their lives any easier. Before the tour even began, as we congregated at the tour operators office, Pedro was already scalping tickets to a local soccer derby later that evening.

Fontarama

The working mine we were visiting had 7 levels. We would be visiting the top 4 levels. Big awkward fellas like me or anyone with even the most nascent agrophobia would be well advised to avoid this trip. The tunnels are narrow and very low with dangerous outcrops of rocks and primitive electrical cabling snagging your clothes as you shuffle your way down towards the centre of the earth. All your senses are dulled by the complete absence of light, the muffling of all sound and the fact that you’re covered head to toe in restrictive protective clothing including a heavy battery pack for the even heavier miner’s helmet and a face mask to stop you inhaling the toxic mineral dust floating around down there. It would be dreamlike if it weren’t so nightmarish. The miners have devised innovative ways to traverse the tunnels and ascend or descend a level. One of which Pedro demonstrates here.

Munchkin inching down a mineshaft guzzying cocoa

We travelled in single file, bookended by the guides so we wouldn’t get lost. At random intervals we’d hear blood curdling, terror inducing shouts to warn us that a mining car was hurtling down the very tracks we were stumbling over. We’d have to race Indiana Jones style to a distant part of the tunnel which would be just wide enough to accommodate the fully loaded careering mining car and us, a group of disoriented and dirty tourists who just wanted some cool photos. The going was seriously tough, as tough as a lot of the treks we did, even though we were taking our time. You'd regularly lose your footing and stumble and gouge your hip or elbow on the uneven walls of the tunnel. A lot of the tour was done on our hands and knees up or down incredibly steep shafts in almost perfect darkness. Working in these sweaty claustrophobic conditions must be heartbreaking. The miners were traditional miners using very manual mining techniques handed down and hard learned through the centuries. There was 1 electric winch serving the entire mine. Everything else was powered by sweat. The ancient iron carts, which looked like relics from the early days of the American railways, are loaded using shovels and then pushed along the tracks by a team of piebald men who, once they gain momentum aren’t going to stop for anything – hence our frantic rush for a lay-by when the shout went up. The loads are then dumped into a shaft where there’s another team of shovel bearers to load the mixed rock, gravel and assorted minerals into huge rubber buckets which are then winched somewhere else to be processed. Kids as young as 12 (technically illegal) lured by the promise of high wages, or co-opted into a lifetime of pain by the weight of tradition, begin their apprenticeship here with the small jobs, bringing the miners cocoa and drinks. We couldn’t wait to see the sun after 3 hours below. I cant even begin to imagine what it must be like for a child with a lifetime of this harrowing work ahead of him who has watched his father and brothers worn to the bone by the impossibly thankless work. The trip was both physically and emotionally draining and Pedro said if there’s one thing to take from our trip to a Bolivian mine, it’s that you should never in good conscience moan about your job again.

I, Me, mining

We finished the trip with an exciting overground demonstration of the building and detonating of a live dynamite charge. All the photos from the mine are by Bronwyn, a nice ozzie girl who kindly forwarded on some photos cos I chose not to bring my camera into the mine – an English couple we’d met had their camera die a miserable death in the mines and recommended we leave ours at home.

Bleedin' Dynamite!

We paid a flying visit to Potosi bus station to book our onward ticket to La Paz and got our first introduction to the most primitive and distressing form of advertising endemic in Bolivia – shouting. People are paid (I presume) to sit on stools beside the offices of bus companies shouting destinations at the top of their voices like a deranged mantra. “A La Paz A La Paz A La Paz” was a particular favourite as was “Cochabamba Cochabamba Cochabamba!!”. The cacophany of 20 or more of these people's shouts echoing through the already bustling station has to be heard to be believed and would make a great sound effect for an ad for Hedex or Solpadeine or even Prozac. I suppose the majority of people here wouldn’t be able to read the signs on the offices advertising destinations so that might explain the shouting but it doesn’t make it any less painful to have to listen to.

Every morning in Potosi outside our hotel there would be hordes of the cutest schoolkids running pint sized down cobblestoned hilly streets to school. All of them would be immaculately turned out, doused in hair oil and wearing the obligatory mini labcoats making them look like prematurely accomplished science prodigies. A lot of them carried a set of panpipes under their arm the way Irish kids would have a tin whistle or a recorder. The kids are obviously taught the ancient art of elevator music from a very early age. We caught a couple of impromptu street performances by school bands and they were lively but painfully tuneless. I wonder does the sight of a tin whistle in other countries provoke the same feelings of dread as a set of pan pipes does when pulled out of a poncho at a party.

A broken shower curtain and an in-shower fuse box

The hotel rooms in Bolivia seemed to be custom built for the compact local clientele as each room we stayed in seemed to be getting smaller. The bathrooms were layed out in such a way as to test the functional limits of a tall man’s bend joints. You almost needed to put your foot in the toilet bowl to balance yourself enough to get out of the shower in some of the places we stayed in. We did however fare pretty well in Potosi with food. We found a café which served up nice falafels and salads and we basically ate all our meals from there. We did get adventurous and visited a Mexican place for our last meal before our overnight to La Paz and it was truly a bad decision. We instigated a new travelling rule : never try a new restaurant before a long bus journey. I spent the entire 10 hours on a flaky bus farting like a clockwork whoopee cushion. My stomach was in serious distress aswell and I vowed never again to get adventurous with food in Bolivia. M and the rest of the passengers on the bus who were assailed with my wafts of stealthy methane accepted my vow of culinary chastity gratefully.


We arrived in La Paz at 530am in a state of abject dishevelment. I don’t think we’d had a more uncomfortable bus journey prior to this one (it was, thankfully unbeknownst to ourselves then, to get even more interesting on our marathon bus journey to Rio.) We were completely disoriented having been woken by the driver shouting at us to get off. We took refuge in a taxi which pulled straight into a traffic jam and a storm of horn blowing and men shouting abuse at each other. At 6am on a Sunday morning? Welcome to La Paz – the noisiest city in the world.