"I give you good price, dynamite very cheap for you today"

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After the excitement of the Death Road, I jumped on a night bus headed south to what is claimed to be the highest city in the world ( http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/highest-cities-in-the-world/4660 ) - Potosi.

At the time the Spaniards descovered the mountain beside the then town's rich mineral deposits, the population exploaded' as the Spaniards imported huge numbers of people to work the mines and fund their eer expanding empire. This meant that at one point in history (between the C16 and early C18), Postosi was also one of the worlds largest in terms of population.

Anyway, I arrived in the wee hours of the morning, and after learning a Polish guy and his American grlfriend could speak fluent Spanish, I latched onto them when the bus rolled in an hour earlier than anticipated, at 6am. Together we shared a taxi and convinced a hostel to let us wait out the remenants of the night in the lobby (not so much "we"-the Polish guy convincd, I just stood there and looked pretty). When the sun creasted over the far off peaks, we set out walking, and I convinced them to do a tour of the mines with me, and by 9am, we were on a bus heading off to the mountain!

It was an odd mix, with three very pleasent Chilean girls, a Dane and a Brazilian guy in our group. As I was the only person who couldn't speak a jot of Espagñe though, I was allocated a guide (called Jose - surprisingly) alllll to myself.

First stop. Miners Market. As you may have gathered now, my dear reader, from the title of this entry, I did indeed buy some dynamite. Before we get to that though, I will go through the process by which it occured.
The tour itself was exceptionally cheap, and so they asked you, as a little supplament, to but a few quids worth of goods as gifts for the miners. These were howcased to me, the first being coca leaves, the second being thirst quenching drinks, the third being the dynamite, and the last being the alcohol the miners drink. My amigo Jose said we should do a shot of the alcohol, "for good health". This came from a white plastic bottle. It was 96%. I am almost certain it was de-greaser. But a fire in yer belly, definatly not for the weak of constitution!! Jose said for just 25 Bolivianos (about 2 pounds) he would put together a goodie bag for me, which included dynamite. He passed it to me first for inspection.
"It´s not dangerous like this, this is just a stick of nitro glycerine ya know? To prime it, you need the mercury detonator and the fuse - here"
He then proceeded to stick in a fuse and detonator, for pictures sake (hence why I have the picture of me petending to smoke a stick - a true death stick). We disamed it and continued.

The mines of Potosi are still very much active, with around 11000 miners still working in the various points on the mountain, in collectives of maybe 12-18, mining minerals like zinc and lead. In times gone past, there were far more though; the previous era saw the government employing seveal times that figure, before the mineral market collapsed and huge swarths of the work force was made redundant. Hence the new self employed collectives. Before the republic was formed however, the mines were a sort of forced labour camp for the Spaniards. They had a 'Mita' system, where indigeneous peoples, as well as Chinease and Africans were drafted in for a years service. These people lived in the mine, coming out only once a week, and being paid appallingly low wages. Because their wages were so low, they were forced to take out loans from their supervisors - loans which were impossible to repay, so when their years service ended, they were forced to stay to service their debts. In these harsh conditions, they worked then, in effect,. until death. Over the three hundred years of Spanish occupation, it is curenty estimated that up to 8 million people died in those mines. A harrowing fact.
Even now, with collapses, toxic fumes and chemicals, not to mention the falls (I was shown several holes of 100m deep), the life expectancy of a miner is only 45 - however, the miners now are very well paid for Bolivians, so it is a trae they are seemingly willing to make.

I was taken through the first level, where tracks are laid to allow carts to be pushed over, and so every now and again we would have to find a niche to hold in whilst one of the 1.5 tonne fully loaded bucket-on-tracks was pushed past. Only the main level had this, everything else was hauled up or down to it by electric/hand winch, and wheel barrow. It was incredibly inteesting being taken through the warren of tunnles, and up and down the rickity ladders, probing the depths of the plkace. This particular mine was home to 14 collectives, each extening their territory by 1m/day - they are still hollowing the monolith out! We went down several levels, and Jose introduced me to som,e of his old mining buds, and prompted me to part with the last of my gifts - the alcohol. They invited us to share it with them, and so in an impromptu half an hour break, we shared cap fulls of the fire water, asking each other questions through Jose. Yet another surreal experience. With each capful, we spilled a couple of splashed on the ground, for Pachamama, the earth goddess to which the miners worship. This emptied the bottle much faster, but I was pretty pleased about that, considering we had about 60m of laddrs to climb back up!

I was shown one last thing before we left, Tio, the devil. Now in Andean mythology, unlike Wesern, no God is inherently good or evil - they have the capacity to do both. So when the Spaniards introduced the effigy to the Mita, as a way of trying to scare them into work, they were surprised to descover that gifts were still beigng made to it. Now these gifts are coca leaves, cigarettes and alcohol - all of which are left by one miner, then a couple of dys later 'shared´ by another - and indeed we did find a half empty bottle of long flat fizzy dink-alcohol mix, to which Jose said we both must drink.

Surely alcohol has something to do with the 100 or so deaths each year in these mines!

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The last of the safternoon I then spent loking around the mint museaum, looking at how the blancs were origionally cut from the rolled silverby hand, then bashed out, then the improvement of quality with the introduction of the press - far far slower, but much harder to fake the coins. And then finally to the mule driven automated line which speak the process back up again. All vey interesting, but withough the added danger of a pneumatic drill spraying you with shards of rock, or hearing the dull cncussions of dynamite explosions deep below, it somehow wasn´t quite as good as the mornings activity!

That night, another night bus, this time to the Salt Flats of Uyuni

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