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Published: June 16th 2006
Simon Bolivar
Bolivia´s liberator on horseback.Maybe it´s unfair, maybe the altitude dampened our mood, maybe because we arrived on the weekend and almost everything was closed we felt the town had little to offer - or maybe it´s just plain old pants!
Potosí for the record, is the highest city in the world ("self-proclaimed") at 3,967m. The town is dominated by the towering pink mountain called "Cerro Rico" (Rich Mountain) where the silver mining takes place. Potosí is certainly rich in history, it´s a mining town which boomed during colonial times when huge amounts of silver were found in the surrounding hills. At the time it was the richest city in the Americas and only London, Paris and Seville were more wealthy, on the world scale. During those heady days, the city was certainly on the up but time has seemingly been hard on Potosí and the town is losing it´s colonial charm and has slowly fallen towards poverty. The rich architecture needs a face-lift as many of the colonial buildings fall into disrepair.
Mining is still a big thing here but the glory days are over
Modelling a New Fleece
The third of the trip so far, first one lost on the flight from London, the second one lost on the Death Road bike ride... the third, we´ll see... and silver mining now only brings about enough money to keep the people fed and watered. Life as a Potosí silver miner is certainly hard work and brings with it a short lifespan. From the first day a Boliviano enters those mines, his life expectancy diminishes to only 15 years thereafter. Most miners get minor silicosis after 10 years and terminal silicosis after 15. The conditions really are shocking; working on all fours for most hours of the day chewing huge balls of coca just to stave off hunger in the hot toxic air (40°C)!! The smaller and younger miners (some only 12 years old) are employed to set and detonate the dynamite on the narrower tunnels - I think that just about sets the scene! The lives of these young children has been documented in a docu-film called
The Devil´s Miner which has just been released and is probably worth a view. Tourists can visit the mines (not on Sundays when we wanted to go) and get to see first-hand the tunnel experience. Tommy was really keen - mainly because it meant he could have detonated dynamite himself (the pyromaniac in him was sweating at the thought) but it was all
closed and so the dreams remained just that. As it is, we can only read about other people´s dynamite fuelled fun in other blogs: e.g.
Joe + Dynamite = :-) !!!!
As it turned out we were confined to the streets of fairly dull and pretty congested, Potosí. We walked and got lost in the narrow streets, we tried to visit a silver museum which was closed, we couldn´t find anywhere open selling decent food and it was fresher´s weekend for uni students here so you couldn´t get anywhere without having to plough through crowds of pis*ed students! On a good day that would have been fun and we might even have partied with the "utes" but we couldn´t be bothered and so in our altitude disaffected moods we scarpered to the town of Uyuni and its surrounding salt covered landscape.
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