After Uyuni, Rochelle, Sam, Jesse, Pascale and I all went to Potosi. The bus ride was not so nice, but it gave us a preview of what was to come. Potosi is the highest city in the world at 4 thousand something meters. So, when we got there at about 1AM, we felt the frigid cold.
Potosi is a beautiful city with colorful colonial buildings overlooking a giant mountain. This giant mountain is the main source of income for the city and has been mined since before the 1500s when the Spanish started collecting silver from it. Rochelle, Sam and I decided it would be a really good idea to take a tour of the mines even though a group of scientists from the US said that it was supposed to cave in 7 years ago because it looks like swiss cheese and there have already been almost 30 deaths from caveins this year alone.
After getting dressed up in our mining outfits and the very important hardhats, we started to descend into the mines. Being a rather average height ¨gringa¨, I had to keep my head down for most of the beginning walk to avoid smacking it on all the lowhanging beams that if I were Bolivian, I wouldn´t have to worry about. As we began to get deeper into the mine and start to descend to the second level, Sam and the other half of our group chickened out and ditched us for daylight and fresh air. Rochelle, two others, our guide and me squeezed through the tunnel heading down and started to actually see the miners at work.
As scary as this experience was, it was well worth doing. We were actually able to see the terrible conditions the Bolivian men work in to earn a whopping $400 a month and have a 35 year life expectancy. They work for 12 hours a day in dark tunnels that are very likely to cave in at any minute, with no lunch break, chewing coca leaves to sustain their hunger and doing everything by manual labor. There are no machines in this whole mountain; everything is mined old school style, like they did in the 1600s. After spending about two hours in the mine, going as deep as the third level and witnessing the deplorable conditions of the workers, we were more than willing to escape the asbestos filled air and find daylight, never, ever again to go back in.
After we left the mine, we were allowed to buy some dynamite, legal buying age: 9, put it together and explode it. I just watched. :) And after a much needed shower, we had a feast of cheap, delicious food and Rochelle, Sam and I left for Sucre, the judicial capital of Bolivia.
