A Whistlestop Tour of Southern Bolivia: Uyuni, Potosi and Sucre

---

For the next couple of weeks I will be on a tight schedule. I am commited to being in Quito for May 16th. This means I´ll be hopping from city to city in southern Bolivia before flying up to La Paz to visit Lake Titicaca and then on to Cusco, time permitting to trek Machu Picchu, before flying on to Quito from Lima.

Arriving in Uyuni after the salt flats was always going to be something of an anticlimax. It was Easter Sunday and I wondered whether there would be some sort of local celebration. If there was, we missed it. Andreas performed one final kindness dropping me off at my hotel and suddenly from being part of a tightly knit group of 6 I was back to pleasing myself again.

My initial impressions of Uyuni were not favorable. It´s a small, unremarkable town, which you would not visit were it not for the accident of its geography. It seemed bedraggled and anonymous even down to the absence of street signs. The centre of town is marked by a clocktower, which passes for a local landmark. The clocktower's most remarkable feature seemed to be that it's clock no longer worked. Uyuni just felt like that kind of place.

Still I was only going to be here for an afternoon and a night and my hotel was quiet and comfortable. I felt a bit better about things after I´d showered, caught up with emails and wandered into town to buy my bus ticket to Potosi. I´d heard that Bolivia would be a lot cheaper than Chile and Argentina (both of which are reputedly expensive by South American standards) and this was confirmed when I bought my bus ticket - 30 Bolivianos, about $3.00 for a 4 hour journey - no wonder the backpack crowd I´d met in Mendoza spoke of Bolivia in such gushing terms.

Things looked up that evening when on my way out for dinner I bumped into Chrystian and Marie and suddenly Uyuni didn´t seem such a bad place to be. We shared a pizza and a couple of beers before they headed off to get some rest before catching a 4am bus back to Chile.

I was curious as to how bus travel in Bolivia would compare to bus travel in Argentina. The bus was a little older and a bit more tired than those I´d been used to, however, someone had clearly carried out a lot of work recently upgrading the roads (mining money perhaps?). Whereas in Argentina, you were rarely more than a few minutes from an unpaved or gravel stretch, in Bolivia, it seemed to me, the roads were newly tarmaced and the crash barriers glistened. We were soon climbing back up above 4,000 metres and zipping along these new roads in splendid isolation through some impressively rugged scenery.

I arrived in Potosi in mid-afternoon, which left me just over a day to see the sights. I´d come to Potosi to visit the mines that once made this city world famous and to admire the legacy they´d left in the form of colonial architecture. Silver was discovered here in the 1540s (according to local legend by a lost Inca herder who noticed that his camp fire made the mountain bubble and ooze with a liquid metal). The Spanish set up a working mine in 1545 and the city never looked back. At its height in the 17th and 18th centuries as many as 200,000 people lived in the city (making it one of the biggest in the world at that time). Potosi effectively bankrolled the Spanish Empire and became synonymous with great wealth. So much so that it gave its name to the silver coins that were mined and minted in the city and for the Spanish "una potosi" came to mean unimaginable riches or good fortune.

All these riches have left a legacy of architecture which testifies to the city´s colonial importance. However, there is of course a darker legacy. The human cost of extracting this silver in lives and human misery is virtually incalcuable. It is estimated that in the 280 years from the mine´s instigation to Bolivia's independence in 1825 as many as 8 million people lost their lives as a result of either: working in the mines (silicosis or mining accidents), in the smelting plants (which relied on poisons such as mercury to help purify the ore and smelt it so that it could be poured into molds for ingots) or as a result of the yellow fever epidemics that periodically ravaged the miners´camps. The vast majority of workers were given no choice in the matter. The indigenous population was used as slave labour, forced into a kind of bondage, giving so many months work a year in return for Spanish protection and civilisation. When their numbers ran low they were supplemented by slaves shipped over from Africa.

Nowadays, the mines are mostly worked by local co-operatives, and are a good deal safer than they once were - under a nationalisation programme in the 1950s a system for pumping compressed air into the pits was introduced. Even so the techniques and equipment used for the mining have changed little over the years and much of the work is still carried out by hand. Dynamite is used to loosen the rock face and then men work the resulting debris with pick and shovel. Loading rocks into metal wagons and manhauling them to the mine entrance.

I had very mixed feelings about visiting the mines. They are at an altitude of 4,300 metres, at which height a brisk walk was enough to leave me panting and breathless. So the thought of descending hundreds of metres into the mountain along a labyrinth of cramped, uncomfortable tunnels, in an often evil-smelling and dusty atmosphere, where temperatures can quickly climb as high as 40 degrees, left me feeling more than a little claustrophobic. I was also a little uncomfortable at the slightly voyeuristic aspect to the tour. These remain working mines and whilst tourists can visit and speculate as to how tough life must be for the miners before heading off for a beer and lunch, the miners themselves, driven by economic necessity, do not have that luxury.

We were a group of about 12 led by an English speaking guide. Our first stop was the miners´market to buy gifts for the miners - coca leaves (lunch), fruit drinks, alcohol or dynamite (!) - not exactly a conventional wishlist but at least in some small way this visit would benefit the miners. Having bought our gifts we were driven up the mountain to the mine entrance where we were kitted out with hard hats and miners' lamps and florescent yellow jump suits to protect our clothing.

Not long after entering the labyrinth of tunnels we were crouching and stooping to make progress, constantly hitting our helmets against low beams. At times it was necessary to come close to crawling to make progress. We climbed rickety ladders, and looked down sheer drops - no health and safety here. The temperature rose and the atmosphere became uncomfortably close and clammy. From time to time the tunnels opened out onto a working gallery, and we stopped to watch the miners at work and pass on our gifts. They seemed pleased to see us, not just because of the gifts, but keen to demonstrate their strength and prowess and pleased at our interest. Whilst conditions are much better than they were and some rudimentary insurance is available to miners if they can afford it and work long enough to claim it, it remains an incredibly hard life. I don't think I'll be trading it for my desk any time soon.

In addition to the miners we also visited a ghoulish effigy to the god of the mine - the Tio - who according to the original native belief lives in and owns all the mountain. The miners believe that everything that happens within the mountain does so under his sufferance. At the beginning of each month they make small offerings to the Tio´s effigy, asking for a safe and profitable month. At the end of the month they repeat the ceremony to show their thanks. In an unusual twist on being happy at work they also believe that anyone who enters the mine angry or unhappy will bring down the Tio´s wrath.

In total we were under the ground for three and half hours and it was with great relief that we made it back out of the tunnel entrance and emerged blinking into the sun. It had been an oppressive ordeal but a fascinating one, made all the more interesting by the presence of the miners and the brief insight this gave us into their lives.

I spent the rest of my time in Potosi doing a circuit of churches and museums. Many of which now look, a little like the mine itself, as though they are shadows of their former selves, but still retain a great deal to look at and admire. Potosi had been an intriguing city, at once hard and fascinating. My hotel had been some distance from the centre, near the bus station, and I´d spent an uncomfortable half an hour walking around with my pack asking nonplussed locals for directions (there are no street signs in this part of town and I did not have a hard copy map) before I located it. The steep hills on which the city is situated made exploration tough going, but equally meant that if you did make the effort the city was always opening out onto unexpected views.

From Potosi I moved on to the city of Sucre, a couple of hours to the north east. This time taking a taxi compartido, (a shared taxi), with a Bolivian taxi driver who clearly thought that these new roads had been provided as a personal race track. (Note to self: the door to door service is all very nice but in future it may be more restful to travel a little more sedately.) Sucre, was the Spanish administrative centre for Bolivia and the first national capital. A heritage of which it is very proud. I took the tour of the La Casa De La Libertad - the building on the town square from which independence was originally declared and in which the original parliament sat, and spent much of my time visiting the 16th and 17th century relics of the colonial past.

Sucre´s original name was "La Plata" (The Silver) and it was to here that much of Potosi´s riches initially flowed. So much so that it now has UNESCO status and is known as the "white city" because of its pretty colonial style whitewashed churches and houses, with terracotta roofs. It´s a difficult place not to like. Not only is it attractive and full of history but it is also a firm favorite with tourists, particularly language students who come here to learn Spanish, and as a result there are plenty of good restaurants and bars.

I´d checked into a nice boutique hotel and after the limitations of the food and accommodation of the Altiplano and the austerity of Potosi, where options for tourists had been more limited, spent the next two days making up for lost time. It was a very pleasant lifestyle, wandering around in the warm autumn sun at a paltry 3,000 metre altitude, stopping of at a courtyard restaurant for lunch (el menu del dia with one eye on my budget), taking a Spanish language tour of a church, nodding along and hoping there would be no questions afterwards, before heading out in the evening to take advantage of the tourist-friendly prices in the excellent restaurants.

---

Photos

Overlooking Potosi from the entrance to the mine
The mine feels very much as though it is part of the city

Heading into the mine
The tube on the right transports compressed air into deeper areas of the mine.

Mineral deposits within the mine
If I´d have known that the deposits were quite so poisonous and lurid looking I would have felt even more uncomfortable

Paydirt?
The silver seam in the rock may or may not be silver

The Tio - god of the mine
The effigy is festooned with small gifts - often coca leaves - in order to ask the Tio for his protection.

Casa De La Libertad - Sucre
Traditional colonial style building with inner courtyard.

Sucre
Looking down from the viewpoint at La Recolata