Advertisement
Published: October 17th 2005
Filmer chop shop
branches from chopping springs to steering wheel conversons.The German, the English couple, and I arrived in Potosi at 2 in the morning after a bus trip that rattled my daggs for 7 straight hours. By golly, it was certainly bumpy!
Then some friendly local told us out hotel was only three blocks up the hill from where we were, so we decided against a taxi and started walking. Now, this is with my 30kg pack on, up hill, at 4200 meters above sea level. After 3 blocks I was exhausted. But our hotel isn´t here, but another 13 blocks up a hill as steep as the top part of Queen st (where the Oriental shops are),
and I can tell you, I wanted to die by the time we arrived at our hotel, Hotel San Marcos. Saint Mark - not a bad name, eh. Only it was totally shut, and no one was interested at answering our repeated knocks. After half an hour of standing in the street thumping on the door, and pressing the buzzer, and quite a few "Hola"s from me, the German found the phone number and gave them a bell. "Oh, you´re on the street out side are you, well, I never heard the
View of Cerro Rico
from the street near our hotel buzzer" Bollocks! My room was on the far side of the hotel, far from the street, and I could hear it every time it rang the following two nights.
After a nice sleep in, our little party went exploring Potosi. I had studied a bit about Potosi, when I was doing my Spanish degree, as it was a major part of Spanish wealth during the 16th, 17th and 18th centeries. So I found rather interesting to be here. It is actually clased as a World Heriatage site, and has a wealth of historical buildings and craft. Potosi was once one of the richest cities on earth thanks to the silver mines here. And those are what I was interesting in seeing. There is a real tourism trade built up around the mines, but hey, I studied the place at a terciary level, so I felt above the rest of the punters here.
The mines arn´t half as bad as I had expected, but doing a 12 hour shift here 6 days a week, wouldn´t take my fancy. The miners can earn twice the average national wage, about 800 bolivians a month, which an´t all bad.
The German was on a
Potosi has many
old churches like this, some 22, in this very small town, thanks to Spanish Catholisim and much silver. pre-packaged trip and visted the mines earlier, so the Brits and I bought some Dynamite, coca leaves, smokes, and went mining. The Dynamite, by the way, cost a $1.50; such cheep fun!!
The mines were pretty low in roof, but wide enough to be comfortable. We visited the Tío, the devilish shirne that is in every mine (based on the believe that God lives in the sky, and the miners practicaly live underground, so the Devil must be more relevant for mining) and the Britts offered offerings of smokes and coca levels and prayers for more silver and safety, but I declined because the God I beleive in doesn´t smoke (well, He doesn´t inhale).
We spent an hour wandering around a maze of tunnels until we found some tied miners and gave them a hand shoveling rocks into buckets that looked liked recycled car tyres.
After that, we where off outside to set of the Dynamite. Boy, she gave off a bang. But I´d like to see it inside something interesting. I´ll leave that to your imagination, as I don´t want to end up being suspected of terrorist inclinations.
Then I was off to the Mint meuso
Cerro Rico
The original name for this mountain was bueatiful mountain. You can see the down side to being full of Silver and Tin. to see where all the precious silver was minted into peices of 8 for the Spanish crown.
And for the following days I spent visiting churches and buildings and stuff and now I am off to La Paz.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.102s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 71; dbt: 0.0677s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
