Another world....

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On recommendation we booked our Mines Tour with Koala Tours. To be fair our disastrous journeys seem to precede fantastic tours, Efra our guide proved to be highly, highly entertaining (including replying to Irene when she had a big head, "small brain", or telling me I could be Monica Lewinsky!) and knowledgeable (which included telling us Potosi miners had no hair on their bodies so Eoin would have all the women if he went out showing his shirt hair!). This is while we are dressing ourselves up as miners, complete with hard hats and lamps! We then went to the miners market to buy gifts for the miners, bottles of soda and dynamite. On reaching the mines, I initially didn´t think I could walk in. However, we did, including crawling down shafts to the second and third levels. We met many of the miners as they passed by pushing tonne weight carts along the tracks. One miner, Felix, sweat streaming down his face told us how he was 17, had been working the mines for three years but was trying to finish high school at night. When we descended to the third level, involving flying down dusty, tiny tunnels while making sure to avoid these big tubes that made mad whistling noises, we "helped" the miners shovel some ore into baskets that they then attached to ropes to be hauled up a hole. When handed the shovel, we thought it was a bit of a novelty, photo opportunity. Not so when after the first shovelful we were ready to quit (think altitude, air that was practically all dust, and having missioned down about a kilometre to this place) but were told to keep going until the baskets were full. When you think of hard work, you can´t even contemplate what these miners face every day. It is a co-operative, so they do get to change jobs every day and can choose their own working hours. However, in practise they work ten hour days down in the dust, their only relief being the football league on Sundays. Also, due to it being a co-operative, all dynamite, equipment and clothes must be paid for by themselves. Unfortunately their lifespan is incredibly short, but mining is the only way of life for people in Potosi. Scrambling back up those shafts, having to climb rickety ladders (literally clawing your way up, no handrails), gave me half an insight into a world completely unlike our own.

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