Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Our trip to Potosí had been made largely to escape the increasing political troubles and chaos in La Paz and as we rolled into town, weary and cranky from a disturbed sleep on the bus in the middle of a road block (a couple of old ladies started discussing politics and full volume around 2.30am), we ran into an independence day party blocking all the streets around the centre of town. While we normally would´ve been keen to join in, neither of us were feeling overly cheerful about the state of Bolivia and we wandered about and found some food in a quiet wee pub away from the action. We checked out the plaza after the celebrations were winding down, it looked like a tip with rubbish and empty beer cups everywhere. Many of the surrounding streets stunk of a smell that was starting to become quite familiar from bolivian streets, urine.

Potosí was, in its day, the centre of wealth of the spanish empire with an enormous silver mine pouring money into their pockets and making Potosí a major hub, at the time bigger than Paris or New York. Nowadays all the silver is gone and the miners spend their days trying to make a living scraping out the leftover minerals such as zinc. As a tourist attraction you can visit these mines and see exactly the rubbish conditions in which these guys work, and thats precisely what we did. I was hesitant, watching others misery doesn´t seem like good tourism to me, until I met a few people who claimed it had been the most worthwhile part of their trip. And so we found ourselves donning dusty overalls and heading into the mine with a dozen others from all over the world.

As we headed into the mine I found myself sort of enjoying the experience, it was quite novel and a bit cliched with the metal trolleys filled with rocks being pushed along train tracks and the ladders descending down into darkness. But soon enough we came across a crew working, setting up dynamite for a blast, which involved dusty, loud drilling (our guide supplied us with wads of toilet paper to jam in our ears for noise protection) and air blasting ammonia into the hole to give the dynamite a bigger pop. The dust made it increasingly difficult to breathe and the reality of working 12 hours a day in such a place started to sink in. We left a wee gift of coca leaves with the crew, which they chew round the clock to keep them going, and headed deeper into the mine.

The trip continued downwards, scaling down the descending ladders, and winding through passages, all the while visiting different work crews doing similarly dusty, difficult and crappy jobs. It made me feel a bit like an engineer again, visiting site to take photos of people working, or maybe just like a dorky tourist. After an hour or so down in the mine we were all starting to feel like we had been there long enough, but we waited well away from the action until the dynamite was set off. The sound echoed deeply around the mine, hanging in the air and shaking the rock walls like a monster from the deep.

The next day we awoke in Potosí, which apparently is the highest city in the world, to settling snow. In the plaza Tessa saw soldiers and children alike running about throwing snowballs at each other, the whole scene being quite surreal.

On the way out of Potosí that day we had our next, more indirect run in with the roadblocks. Our bus driver, knowing that the road was blocked, picked a way out of town through the back streets which eventually took us off roading through the desert. This was all well and good, the bus almost tipping only a few times, until we came across the city water supply pipe which ran half a metre off the ground. Out we all jumped and started constructing a stone bridge over the pipe, a successful crossing followed and we made our way bumping along the unpaved desert track to Uyuni.

Uyuni, placed in the middle of a flat desert, is a launching base for trips into the salt flats which is exactly why we were there. Unfortunately the dusty drab little blip of a town has very little else to do, which became a problem as we found ourselves ¡Trapped Again! The day of the referendum, the police closed all roads into and out of all towns in the country and most of the few shops in town were closed. We found ourselves wandering about the main square aimlessly with all the other trapped tourists and taking loads of pics of everyday things. At one stage there was a queue out the door of the internet café and a steady stream wandering past the town dump to the only other sight in town, a train cemetery filled with rusting shells of carriages and engines. For us it was the second day of killing time here as I had been brought down by a case of Bolivian Belly (one of the two of us had a crook gut for most of our time in Bolivia!)

The referendum day came off with very little trouble around the country, the people in Uyuni seemed to treat it as a holiday. Even the police were treating themselves to candy floss from the street vendors. After being stuck in town for a few days we finally headed off for our grand adventure to the salt flats and the high altitude desert areas to the south.