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Published: August 12th 2007
Hola chicos y chicas
I hope this blog finds you in good form. I have certainly been keeping busy since Marnie left me last week, seeing some female wrestling and biking down the world's most dangerous road whilst in La Paz, and visiting the silver mine in Potosi in southern Bolivia.
When I came down for breakfast at my hostel in La Paz, the girl at reception told me that they were organising a trip to watch some "Cholita wrestling" that evening if I fancied it. She told me that it was an experience I really should not miss, and with that kind of hard sell, I felt in no position to refuse! That afternoon I jumped into a minivan with some others from my hostel to watch my first live wrestling match!
When we arrived at the tiny indoor stadium, the atmosphere was already charged, with hundreds of baying locals banging their chairs in anticipation of the evenings entertainment. We were ushered to the ring-side seats reserved especially for the gringos, and apprehensively waited for the action to begin.
First up was Spiderman versus the Mutant Ninja Turtle. This was a slightly one-sided affair, with
the turtle no match for Spiderman's nifty moves. The coup-de-grace came when Spiderman got the Ninja Turtle in an aeroplane spin, and finished the move with a body slam that left the turtle writhing on the floor in agony, much to the delight of the crowd. They obviously don't go much on turtles around here.
Next bout was between "The Golden Falcon" and "Mortice" (some bloke dressed in a skeleton outfit who liked to wiggle his bum in front of the female tourists). This was a fairly close fight, until the referee "Mister Ramirez" got involved, barging "The Golden Falcon" out of the ring when he was on the verge of winning. The crowd were not impressed by this intervention, and start booing Mister Ramirez and throwing bits of fruit and plastic cups at him. It really was great entertainment!
There was a great build up to the next fight, the first Cholita bout of the night. A Cholita is a traditionally dressed Bolivian woman, complete with 5 cardigans, about 3 skirts of varying lengths, and a little hat perched on her head. The first in the ring was "Diabla", a rather scary looking lady who looked like
she had just arrived from a Kiss concert. Much hissing and booing followed, along with more fruit lobbed onto the stage. She didn't seem to care too much, goading the crowd to "have a go if you think you're hard enough". Next in the ring to the accompliment of firecrackers was "Anita Flores", the people's sweetheart. She threw flowers into the audience as she serenely walked around, to wild applause and wolf-whistles. The wrestling itself, when it started was slightly bizarre, with Anita Flores and her billowing skirts and Diabla in her pink lycra pants, throwing each other around the ring. Mister Ramirez inevitably got involved again, pulling poor Anita Flores' pigtails when she had Diabla in a particularly vicious head-lock. The crowd were going wild. I had never seen anything like it I must say! The two gladiators fell out of the ring and continued their battle right in front of the gringos. I started booing Diabla as she rammed Anita Flores' head into the side of the ring - bad move as she came over to me growling, grabbed my beer and threw the contents all over the people sitting behind me!! In the end it was chaos,
with both girls teaming up against the referee, Mister Ramirez, who ran for the sanctuary of the dressing room.
All in all, there were eight fights that night, with contestants including a mummy ("La Momia Ramses II"), a werewolf, a clown, an army sergeant ("Comando Zabala") and a couple more cholitas. It was great fun, and as a Cholita wrestling virgin before the night started, I am now a fully fledged convert to the art of swinging someone around a ring by their pigtails!!! They have a website which is under construction, but should be worth a laugh when it is up and running - it is http://www.cholitaswrestling.com
The next day I was up early to meet up with the guys from Gravity, the company that organises the mountain bike trip down the Worlds Most Dangerous Road. Despite meeting for breakfast in town for 7am, I was wide awake and looking forward to the challenge. The road from La Cumbre to Coroico itself is 60km long, 20km on tarmac and 40km on dirt track, with 6km uphill and the rest a very steep downhill. You drop 3600 metres in that time, and at the top it is bloody
freezing! I was wearing a tee shirt, a fleece, a jacket, and a protective layer on top, as well as normal trousers and protective trousers....and it was still cold!! Once you start hurtling down you soon warm up though, and by the time you get to the bottom you are in a rainforest and just wearing a tee-shirt. A new road has recently opened up, meaning that the old dirt track you plummet down is less likely to see a large lorry coming at you in the opposite direction, which can only be a good thing! Before the new road opened, the World's Most Dangerous Road (sorry - I love saying that!) claimed on average the life of one person per day. There are huge 600 metre drops in the rainforest below as you whizz down the switch back road, with hardly any safety barriers - it really is exhilirating. The bikes we had though were brilliant, costing around $2,500 and with bloody good brakes (always a bonus when free wheeling down hill!). The brakes were actually too good for yours truly - on the tarmac section at the top, a lorry appeared from around a corner and I instintively
braked. Bad move, as I was travelling at around 50kmph! The bike skidded to an almost instant halt, while I kept moving at the same velocity. Luckily I had enough layers on at that stage to resemble the Micheilin Man, and no serious damage was done - just a few bruises and grazes...and of course my pride. The front wheel on my bike was completely buckled though and needed to be replaced - just as well the support bus was carrying spares! Suprisingly I found a dirt track easier to cycle on than the tarmac - I guess by that stage of the day I had got used to my bike and was able to take corners with more confidence - despite the massive drops below. When we made it to the bottom, we chilled out in an animal sanctuary for a few hours, and were presented with our "I survived the Worlds Most Dangerous Road" tee shirts by Alastair, our guide and the owner of Gravity. He was a top man (for a kiwi!) and made sure everyone had a safe and enjoyable day - great safety tips and also a good sense of humour. I made a new
friend at the animal sanctuary by the way - "Grandma", a 25 year old spider monkey took a liking to me and feel asleep on my lap whilst giving me a big hug!
I took an overnight bus the following day to Potosi, a mining town in the south of the country. It was very cold there. I arrived there at 4.30am in the morning and it was snowing. Half asleep I managed to get into a taxi, mumble my hostel address and stumble into a dorm room around 5am. The hostel manager kindly switched the light on to point out my bed, much to the annoyance of the other three people in the room trying to sleep. I apologised to everyone on the managers behalf, and went to bed with all my cloths on, and my wooley hat - and my teeth were still chattering!!
Potosi was a nice enough town despite being a bit nippy at night. With the discovery of ore in silver-rich Cerro Rico (the hill overlooking the town) in 1545, it was once Latin America's largest and wealthiest city. The conditions the miners had to work in were (and still are) appalling, with
8 million workers dying from disease and accidents over the three centuries of colonial rule. Over the centuries, silver production began to wane however, and nowadays only small scale silver extraction continues, with the world-wide demand for zinc, copper and lead keeping the place going. The town itself is very pretty, with colourful colonial buildings leading off a bustling main square dominated by (surprise, surprise) a large cathedral. Potosi also has an interesting claim to fame - it is officially ranked as the highest city in the world, at 4,020 metres above sea level. It certainly felt like it - you felt yourself short of breath after walking very short distances. On my first full day in Potosi I went around the mint museum (this is where Bolivia used to make all it's coins - makes sense with so much silver nearby!) - I certainly took my time going round the exhibits, gasping for air at the same time!
I visited the Cerro Rico mines the following day with a very nice girl from Maidstone in Kent called Helen. We were given all the necessary gear (jacket, trousers, boots, miners helmet, lamp), and taken to the nearby miners market
to buy provisions for the miners. It's a voluntary things, but it is nice for the tourists visiting the mines to buy bottles of pop, coca leaves, and other bits and bobs for the miners. One thing we bought for the miners was dynamite, complete with detonators and a fuse. Apparently it's available over the counter anywhere in Potosi. The miners use it to blow holes in the mines - bloody dangerous if you ask me! I can now say I have visited two places in the world where you can buy high explosives "over the counter" - the other being the surreal town of Coober Pedy in Australia's outback when I was there in January. We bought three sticks of dynamite - two for the miners..and one for us to blow up outside the mine - just to see what it was like! Another favourite of the miners is some "poteen" style whisky - 96% proof!! It looked absolutely lethal, and made you boss-eyed just smelling it. I wouldn't like to try and stagger around in a mine after a few of those I'm telling you!
The mine experience itself was memorable in a lot of ways -
not all good. We ventured through three different levels, each one deeper than the first. The tunnels got narrower the deeper you went, and climbing between levels involved squeezing yourself through log-laden shafts. To start with on the first level I was crouching slightly, but by the time I wriggled through various shafts to the third level, I was on my hands and knees and struggling to get through really low and narrow tunnels. We clambered through small gaps that would suddenly open up into a small cavern where the miners were busy either chiselling away at the walls, loading buckets with rocks, or winching the rocks to another higher level. It was also stifling hot down there (it gets up to 45 degrees apparently), and I have never experienced the amount of dust that was floating around visibly in the tunnels. Breathing was hard, especially when clambering down the narrow shafts to other levels, and even with a bandana over my nose and mouth, I was coughing a lot from the amount of dust I was breathing in. I wouldn't recommend the trip down there to anyone suffering from asthma or claustrophobia, that's for sure.
I don't know
how the miners survive down there. Exposed to a myriad of noxious chemicals, they normally die within 10 years of silicious pneumonia after entering the mines. They seemed very pleased with the coca leaves, fizzy pop and dynamite we gave them. They even let us have a go at shovelling rocks into a big bucket, which was very kind of them (!). The miners work down there as a co-operative venture, each miner milking his own claim and selling his ore to a smelter through the co-operative. Ridiculously tough conditions though, and after two hours in the tunnels we had had more than enough. When we asked our guide Ocho which way to go back up, he said "The same way we came down of course!". Helen and I both grimaced. It was twice as hard as going down, having to heave yourself up on the logs on your stomach, and propel yourself forward by lodging your feet against the narrow shaft walls. The relief when we eventually made in back into daylight was immense. As a reward for our efforts, Ocho lit our dynamite, stuffed it under a few rocks a safe distance away and told us to stand
back. The three minute fuse seemed to last for ages, then all of a sudden there was an almighty BANG! and a big puff of dust into the air. Great fun! I videoed the whole thing but unfortunately computers in Bolivia are so slow it would take me a week to upload it here. You will have to watch it with the other 10,000 photos and videos when I get back!!!
Anyway gang - that's enough for now. Next stop is Salar de Uyuni, with it's salt flats, weird rock formations, sulphur lakes and flamingoes. I reckon there may be some good photo opportunites there!
Until the next time.
Doogs
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David O´Connor
non-member comment
Hola!!!!
Hey Sean, Great to read the blog sounds like you and Marnie had a great couple of weeks since we met in Cusco. Good to hear that you are enjoying Bolivia, amazing country but not without its dramas, we also had our fair share of incidents there! We are now in Colombia, absolutely amazing country with incredibly friendly people - one for your list when you come back!! Anyway enjoy the Salt Flats and Rio, its crazy to think we will all be back soon, cant get my head around it!! Hasta luego Dave