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Published: August 7th 2006
The Mine Entrance
And sacraficed llamas in the foregroundArriving in Potosi at five in the morning was not good for several reasons.
1. Potosi seems to be one of the only cities in South America that doesn't't run on a grid system.
2. None of the streets are signposted.
3. One and two combined with the fact that we didn't't arrive at a bus stop meant we got hopelessly lost. Yes we are admitting it for maybe the first time ever that we go lost.
4. Being the first time our stubbornness prohibited us from taking a taxi, meaning we wandered around. Lots.
5. Being the highest city in the world at 4090 meters, we quickly got tired of wandering around.
Eventually we succumbed to the horror of taking a taxi something that is deeply against both our morals - especially if i have to pay for it as well. After the taxi driver ripped us off and dropped us of at the address of the hostel we had tried to book from Uyuni, we were greeted by the porter saying (In Spanish) that this was the wrong place and that to stay there would cost us eight times as much as we wanted. This meant back
With the Miners
Success - we had passed as locals thanks to our subtle outfits out onto the street to what had quickly become a favorite pastime of wandering in the dark. We finally found another HI place (A chain of Hostels) and we managed to convince them that the recite we had was for a room there, result. Comfortable though this place wasn´t and the beds felt like nothing more than a plank of wood but which was apparently a mattress. Still at 6 am not having slept much on the night bus from Uyuni, it could have been a fair bit worse, and we crashed out.
Awakening the next day to the news of continuing Israelis bombing raids on Lebanon being spurted from the mouth of a monotonous CNN presenter was not my preferred way of waking up. It was 12 o-clock though so after hot showers we when out to explore the wonders of Potosi. I quickly found that it was not at all as i expected, reading that it was one of the poorest city's in Bolivia gave me the impression that the whole city would be run down and well a mess. However we were greeted by masses of very beautiful colonial building with ornate churches scattered around
Uncle George
The Devil in the mountain on who the miners pour 96% alcohol and leave cigarettes. the city. The poverty was evident by the amount of beggars that we could see and the state of some of the areas, but the centre showed little sign of it.
We refueled and found a tour company with the very important English speaking guide, and so headed of to the silver mines. Potosi was founded due to the discovery of silver in the mountain just behind the town. The city quickly grew as the mountain yielded huge amounts of gold from its interior which funded much of the spanish emperor. The city swelled to a size of 160 000 people which we were told was bigger than London at that time, the 1680s to 1750s we think. We were also informed that the mountain, Cerro Rico, was originally just over 5100 meters but has shrunk to 4800 meters due to it being so intensely mined.
Our first stop on the tour was the miners market where we were to buy gifts to give to the workers for letting us come and see the mines. They were all items that they used everyday and could freely buy but found expensive. Amongst the now familiar Coca leaves
Assending a Shaft
A long way to fall. and free rolled cigarettes there were sticks of dynamite, detonators, nitro glsyine, and 94% alcohol so just your normal market stall. We bought some dynamite.
On the way up the guide explained to us that it was day of the Llama so there was a big party up in the mines and not many people were working. We donned our tourist yellow coat and miners hat, both very fetching and obviously meant to make us blend in with the miners, and headed up to the mouth of on of the mines. Here we stopped and our guides; two very small women , around 4 ft 6, who when wearing there yellow coats were the spitting image of the Umpalumpas, told us that they were sacrificing Llamas and spreading the blood on the mines to appease mother earth and the devil god that they worshiped inside the mines.
From here we went in to the blackness and we quickly stifled by the hot acrid air that we had to breath. The mines were narrow, low and dark with miners rail lines on the floor of the passage. We were led to a working "troop" of around 6
people who we sitting drinking and enjoying the festivities in the mine for some reason. The miners are a co-opperative and the groups sell all of the oar the dig to the refinary. We gave them some of the 94%alcohol which the mixed and then started drinking, before they drink some they spill some on the ground for paccamama (mother earth) and then consume the rest. The workers showed us the silver lines in the rock about 2 to 3 centimeters in diameter and said that if the seam goes up they go up if it goes down they go down. The oar they dig is around 5% silver.
We went on the a very odd little museum in the mountain where the only really interesting thing was the ancient statue that had been carved out of the devil. It was painted red and littered with offering that the workers had given these typical were coca leaves, cigarettes, and alcohol. Everything the Devil loves. After sprinkling some alcohol on the devil we drank some of the 94% proof stuff ourselves. needless to say it wasn't very nice and felt like a fire inside my stomach, "good for killing
bacteria" are guide jovially tells us.
On our way out from where the devil is i asked the guide what the white crystals on the side of the mines were, "don't touch that" she implored "that's asbestos, very dangerous". Looking a little more closely i could see that the entire length of the passage wall was coved in the fine hair like crystals.
We took a turn that led us steeply up a ladder and were greeted by the smell of BBQ meat wafting down the tunnel. We emerged on the other side of the mountain and went down to where the BBQ was being cooked. Needless to say it was Llama meat that had been chucked on an open fire. There was also a pumping sound system chucking out Bolivian style techno. Most of the men were drunk and had lama blood on there face, here we were offered another drink which we could only ascertain was made from the mountain, a kind of thick muddy sludge with a copper colour. Almost made me vomit instantly.
After enjoying some of the big bones of lama meat we found our way back to the
hostel, watched Faren height 911, as funny as it is bad, and crashed. Up early we made our way to the bus depot where we were confronted by several people offering busses to sucre. After bartering we got on a bus that left straight away for the countries capital. - Ian
Ian while packing forced me to downsize on the reading I was loading into my rucksack. Having finished the few novels I brought I was, when stuck down by illness in La Paz, forced to dip into the detritus other travelers see fit to leave around. (Ian of course is still trotting through my collection). The collection offered, in English, a guide to English Grammar, a set of Sherlock Holmes stories (Already read), and The Old Patagonian Express, the travel diary of Paul Theroux as he takes a train from Boston to Patagonia. After much head scratching (I have been meaning to brush up on my Grammar) I elected to read the later.
His narrative, while witty and sharply observed on the superficial level left me mildly enraged. Like all intellectuals who have found they excel in a particular area (Though I´m not sure I
think he was at least considered for a Nobel Prize, when he was in Buenos Aires, Brouges, who did win a Nobel Prize, had heard of him and they met up, and he was close friends with Bruce Chatwin, whose "In Patagonia" is the Bible of any serious visitor) decides he is able to offer an equally qualified opinion on every other sphere of social human endeavor. Though reaching perhaps a relatively sophisticated Coburg 6 (In Psychiatry the level of moral though where issues are decided on abstract principles), the principles are themselves those of a 6 year old in Sunday School, but eloquently expressed to the extent that no doubt many of his readers were left convinced. As the man on the spot the retort that "You haven´t seen it" , often deployed by those who have traveled when referring to some social phenomenon, he becomes naturally hard to contradict as he paints straw men of his ideological opponents (The man on the train who insists the Peruvians want to subsistence farm etc) and then demolishes them. I appreciate that Mr. Theroux is entitled to his opinion but it left me resolved to restrain from offering mine - something
I instantly fail to do when I come to write about Potosi.
The highest and once the richest city in the world, Potosi owes this former status to the titanic silver deposits in the mountain which dominates the city. It began being seriously mined by the Spanish, since when conditions and equally importantly techniques haven´t improved. Several years ago the miners striked against low wages, the company paying them collapsed leaving them to run the mine themselves, since when they´ve had discovered striking rather more difficult. Every person you encounter is moved by the terrible conditions in which the miners work. Tunnels only a few feet high, poor ventilation, shifts lasting up to two days and all for a pathetic wage. Each school in town actual runs three schools, each running for a third of the day, while the other two thirds of the day are spent in the mines - children having the advantage of being small. But mention "Uncle George", the devil who lives in the mountain (A relic of the pagan gods the jesuits could not eradicate, fearing to enter the mines), the llama sacrifices to the mountain etc and most tourists smile to have
Fresh Orange Juice
The source of Davids' illness? found a corner of the world immune to Western civilization. The Bolivians to seem proud to have an industry controlled and run by Bolivians and not foreigners.
This tale of well meant human idiocy is what leaves Bolivia in such dire poverty - the same hermeneutic which perceives the mine as an emblem of religious identity prevents it from being used as it should be - as source of wealth. To take over the mines and run them efficiently and mechanically would seen as outrageous by almost all. The livelihoods of the miners seem to outbalance through focus (As they almost did in the UK) the livelihoods of everyone else in the country. No wealth must go abroad, even if it would mean more for Bolivia as well, while they sit back, blame their poverty on the West and their lack of coast line ("Stolen" by Chile in the War of the Pacific) and Asia industrializes. Meanwhile tourists see the miners traditions, the countries poverty, and smile and scream at the same phenomenon.
Sucre, while attractive has little else to recommend it in terms of things to do. We passed the better part of the day
La Paz
Riding up the hillside searching going to some Dinosaur footprints outside the city, got there, found the site closed (Though from the fence we could plainly see them) and walked back to the city. While sitting in a cafe on the main plaza we got chatting to a Canadian called Craig, and met on the street (And again in the hostel) a German girl called Merum, both of whom, after a brief wander around the city, we went to dinner with. Dinner turned into drinks and drinks into more drinks and probably (Memory fades) more drinks. Made it back to the Hostel about 4, realized I´d left Ian´s bag behind, went back to the club and then back to the hostel to pass out.
Waking up and regretting it about 11 next morning we sat around on the pleasant Veranda (Some of the rooms in this "hostel" had hot tubs) and passed the time of day with an Israeli on standby to be recalled and sent into Lebanon. I told him I'd been in the Army.
"I trained with the British Armored Division. Very Good Soldiers, very disciplined."
I told him I didn't think I was a very good soldier.
"Did you go to war?"
"No"
He shrugged. "You didn't have to be."
"You?"
"I was shot in the leg outside Hebron."
"A couple of days before I left England I spoke to one of my old corporals. He's in Afghanistan now."
"Good luck to him."
And so I sat on the veranda in the tropical sun with my hangover and felt sorry for myself. Caught the afternoon bus to La Paz with, slept through and arrived at about 7 the next morning.
We had decided to try and fund our expedition by setting up an export company while we were out here, with an old school friend, also at Exeter, called Ed Argyle. Our original plan had just been to ship stuff back from a few places as we went around, but it had all grown a bit. We'd decided to use one point, La Paz, and see if we could make an arrangement with a wholesaler, or better still, producer, while in the UK Ed was to contact retailers and see if he could set up regular orders. It's still in progress but either way it's taken us from the oak paneled offices of international couriers to sunny rotting yards with old women weaving alpaca, and however it goes its been damn good fun. In order to get an import license and for various other reasons we've also registered with company house, so at least we can say that at 19 and 20 we were legally directors of own company.
Craig had been in Bolivia for rather longer than us, and so to make ends meet was working in the bar at one of the larger western serving hostels. Unfortunately his was full so we were forced to find another where we at least had a private room, but distinctly lacking in social areas. We spent the day working on the business and passing the time in between with "Beetlewatch", where Ian and I compete to see who can spot the most beetles. It got rather competitive and ended up with us both running to try and see round the next corner first. Decided this was rather sad (And I was losing) so called a halt to Beetlewatch.
Unfortunately I managed to eat something during the day which disagreed with me and by the evening was feeling quite ill, so we decided to forsake an evening in Craig's´ bar. The next day became something of another nothing day as we were occupied by more business admin but with me still ill and Ian reluctant to leave me to it simply got less done.
Day three in La Paz and with me feeling better we went to see what we could of the Bolivian independence day celebrations. We´d spotted bandstands being set up in the main square the day before so made a beeline for it after breakfast (My first meal in a couple of days) and were rewarded with a parade and loudspeaker commentary somewhat beyond our spanish abilities. The rest of the day was spent sorting out kit and arrangements for our plans to climb Huayna Potosi, at 6088 meters before snow and ice (About 20 000ft). Having booked a couple of guides and a porter and sorted our equipment, we headed off for dinner with Zander (The Canadian we were climbing with) before bed - needing to rise early the next morning. - David
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David's Dad
non-member comment
Hope you kept the grammar book
You might very well find the book of some use. Very pleased to be one of the venture capitalists supporting your current commercial operations. Look forward to getting my reward somewhat earlier than in heaven! David's Dad