Sucre and Potosi

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After La Paz we spent a few days chilling out in the beautiful city of Sucre (officially the capital of Bolivia). From Sucre, we visited dinoland on the exquisitly cheesy dinobus. Dinoland contains loads of dinosaur footprints preserevd in the rocks. Lifesize models had been created based on the footprints, of the dinosaurs that once roamed this part of the earth, one of which a bit like a diplodocus was up to 36m in length. When we were away from ´Jurassic park´ we were mostly drinking barcardi and playing Perudo (some odd betting game with dice, greatly enhanced by the presence of rum and coke). Hannah was a bit poorly and therefore missed out on the delights of Perudo.

Next Potosi, at 4000m, the highest city in the world. Me and Fabian took a tour of the infamous Cerro Rico mines. Made famous by the appauling working conditions, the combination of high altitude, lack of ventilation, dust, extreamly high temperatures ad complete lack of anything safety related make this place probably the worst place to work on the entire plannet. The average life expectancy after starting to work in the mines is something like 15 to 20 years, forget Rolls-Royce, this really is hell on earth!! We only spent a couple of hours in the mines, but that was enough, the heat, lack of oxygen and dust were really getting to me. Hats off to the miners who can work over 12 hours without a break here. We met several miners who were all chewing the coca leaves and drinking 96% alcohol (of course we were made to try it...) Apparantly this is the tradition on a friday (just like we go up the pub for a lunchtime pint, only the miners prefere something a bit stronger), maybe this is the real reason the life expectancy is so low!!

Once outside the mines, it was a bit more fun. We had purchased a dynamite kit (containing one stick of Bolivian dynamite, one fuse and detonator, and some ammonium nitrate) from the local corner shop. It was clearly now time to blow it up! Now to simply place it in the ground and watch it blow up from a safe distance would not be very scarey. Why not light the fuse and pass it round the group! Apparently we had 3 minutes for this game of dynamite roulette, I wasn´t confident. Sure enough we weren´t blown to smitherines and there was enough time for our guide to sprint away to a safe-ish distance and then BOOM!

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