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(Post by Mike)
Well, while I have perhaps gotten a bit too used to doing minimal work and so have not been updating this blog for a while, I have promised Jess I would work to catch us up today.
Disclaimer: Any Brewer or Neufeld parents should probably not read this blog post. If you do, just know we were totally unharmed by Potosi and have learned our lesson for the rest of the trip.
Potosi bills itself as the world's highest city, sitting at over four kilometers above sea level. It was fortunately just a short, paved bus ride from Uyuni and had a great hostel (heating in the rooms and hot showers! What brilliant features), so we made it our next destination.
The morning of the 6th, we started the day with a short walk around the town, seeing the pretty main square and some old churches built with the money generated by the massive amounts of silver that have been extracted from the nearby mountain of Cerro Rico. Legend has it that the silver was so plentiful in this mountain that a settler lit a campfire on the mountainside and was surprised when molten
Spicy!
Mike experiencing an extremely hot saltena! silver started to run down the side of the hill! At one point, Potosi was the most populated town in South America, filled with prospectors and slaves to extract the precious commodities in the mountain. Nowadays, it seems to be struggling and focuses more on tourism and production of mediocre beer.
On the recommendation of a fellow guest at our hostel who looked quite well-traveled, we stopped at a "popular local place" for lunch. I immediately saw how so many 19-year-olds from Europe, Australia and North America can afford to backpack in South America for 6 months or a year... lunch at this place cost $1.75 for Jess and I, and was a 3 course meal. Unfortunately, the food quality was also proportionately lower than the carefully researched, TripAdvisor-reviewed places I typically drag Jess to for our meals. I wish we had a photo of the "volcano cake" we were supposedly served for dessert... it was a liquid soup of flour and potentially some chocolate byproducts. On a sidenote, at a later date we finally found good food in Potosi - the legendary "saltenas" which are like hot pastry pockets filled with spicy meat stew. Tasty! Anyway, we escaped
that local lunch with our stomachs wary but still operational, and proceeded back to the hostel for our day trip... passing yet another massive Bolivian festival shutting down the main street. These people have a festival every second day, it seems!
Emboldened by our time in Uyuni, we felt invincible, and so signed up for a supposedly safe guided tour of the Cerro Rico mines that afternoon. At our first stop, we were being given some token safety gear when suddenly a guy in full mining gear runs out of a nearby room brandishing a rifle. Turns out he just wanted Jess to take a picture holding it. I realized then the flexible definitions of "safe" and "tourist attraction" in Bolivia, and realized what we had gotten ourselves into.
We enjoyed a brief stop to pick up "gifts" to give to the miners when we visited their workplace (gifts primarily being alcohol, water and coca leaves), where our guide, Julio, grabbed what he said was a stick of nitroglycerin for miner's dynamite before dropping it down on the ground. We prepared for quick death before he started laughing - it was a trick. He then eagerly gave us
each a miniature shot of 97% alcohol to increase our bravery for the trip. This was the personality of the guide in charge of our safety for the day.
We then arrived by bus to a silver refinery currently in operation in Potosi. It was totally unguarded, anyone could stroll right in. In the first room after the doorway was a vat of cyanide out in the open, used to extract the silver from the ore. It appears Bolivia does not follow any equivalent of OHSA, not that we were too surprised. The next room was full of moving machinery and chemicals, with no guiderails or safety equipment being used by the employees. Julio reached into a nearby trough and pulled out some liquid silver on his bare skin. I became more convinced that Julio's time in the mines had knocked a few screws loose.
The mine itself was surrounded by a small village of crude shanties, with piles of garbage and packs of wild dogs roaming around. The entrance to the mine was covered in dried blood - the miners sacrifice llamas at the entrance to ward off cave-ins. Well, since foreshadowing is
purely a literary device, we decided these warning signs couldn't possibly mean anything, and proceeded into the mine.
To summarize the mine, let me just say that there is a reason why mines are not popular tourist attractions everywhere in the world. It was dark, wet, with silver nitrate and sulphur clogging the air and the sound of dynamite explosions and crumbling rock off in the distance. After about 20 years in the mine, a miner's teeth, eyes, and eventually lungs will fail them. We climbed up and down some near-vertical tunnels, dodged about a dozen passing mine carts, helped fill a bucket full of 200 kilos of ore, and avoided stalagmites of pure arsenic. At one point, we had to walk across two creaky wooden planks, spanning a 30-foot pit. When I nervously asked, Julio claimed no tourist to date has yet fallen in. I think he was a little annoyed at my call-outs of major safety hazards throughout.
We learned that there are no engineers in the mine; instead, the oldest miner decides where the dynamite goes. No wonder Bolivians claim up to 6 million people lost their lives in the mines since the
1500s. I've never been happier to see sunlight when we emerged from that mine, and will never do something so stupid again.
Somewhat giddy to still be alive when back to Potosi, we were asked by two older gentlemen and a Swedish couple if we wanted to join them for dinner. It turned out the older folks had flown to Bolivia specifically to visit the mine - turns out one was the non-fiction author Tom Zoellner, who was there to research the mines for an upcoming article in the Smithsonian magazine on the ethics of ecotourism. We gave our thoughts on the experience over dinner while he scratched down notes. Maybe we will be featured in the article!
While probably one of the most interesting days of my life (and much of the experience is hard to put into words, I hope I have done it at least some justice)... I wouldn't willingly put Jess or I in that kind of danger again. I'm just happy to think that half of the profits from our trip will go towards improving the quality of life of the poor miners of Potosi.
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