Potosi and the most dangerous mine in the world.

I know, I know. It's been a couple of years since the last post but better late than never eh? eh? Guys........


Potosi is a city famous for two things; being one of the highest cities in the world and being the city that boasts the most dangerous working mine on the planet. Established in 1545 its makeshift tunnels have been the cause of over 5 million deaths. From collapses and overwork by the Spanish during its long colonial past and the catastrophic lung complaints that nearly 100% of workers currently excavating the silver and other minerals in its depths will certainly die of before the age of 45.

We arrived in Potosi, breathless from the altitude (4090m above sea level) and the white knuckle ride along the Cliffside tracks that constitute the majority of the Bolivian road  network. The driver, obviously unhappy at the lack of excitement during the journey made a last ditch attempt to plough into a car as he swung the bus into the station but thankfully the other driver was on point and swerved wildly into oncoming traffic to avoid him. No harm done.

Potosi is a nice city, a mixture of colonial churches, plazas and the more modern single storey brick dwellings the majority of Bolivians call home with what looks like a giant hill looming ominously over the city. This hill it turns out is a veritable ant colony of brittle tunnels and dangerous silica where the vast majority of Potosi's inhabitants make a living by collecting silver and various other minerals used in mobile phone and laptop production.

 

 

We shuffled around the city for a while before booking our guided tour into the mine for the next morning. Despite having more or less acclimatised to the altitude by now it felt like we had the fitness levels of a morbidly obese 75 year olds as we crawled up and down the hills of the city. It did not bode well for the visit to the mine the next day, where oxygen in the tunnels would fall to dangerously low levels, muscled out by the cancer causing properties of the silica dust blowing in clouds throughout.

 

The tour started with a visit to the local market to pick up gifts for the miners. Bottles of 96% alco puro and sticks of dynamite as well as bags of coca leaves to combat the effects of altitude and stave off hunger for the duration of their 16 hour shifts. Dynamite in hand we went to change into the overalls and hard hats we'd be wearing for our journey to the centre of the earth.

 

'Do we have masks?' another tourist asked. 'No' answered the guide. Nervous looks were exchanged as we wrapped scarves around our faces and boarded the bus that would take us to the entrance.

 

The entrance itself did little to dispel the nerves as we arrived up to its crumbling threshold. It was at this point that two women decided it wasn't for them and made their way back to the bus with horrified looks on their faces. As you can see here it most certainly does not look too appealing to the claustrophobic.

 

 

 

 

 

As we entered, the air immediately became stiflingly hot and the scarves we'd tied across our nose and mouth did nothing to help our breathing. We pulled them down and instantly started coughing as a rush of dust was inhaled into our lungs. The capful of 96% alcohol we'd ingested at the market burned reassuringly in our empty stomachs as the passageway continued to narrow.

 

After crawling on hands and knees for a while we reached a hole barely big enough to squeeze my shoulders through. our guide pointed to it with a big grin on his face. Three more women decided to opt out at this point and were escorted back to the entrance. One of them was crying.

 

As we descended, so did the oxygen levels, we were to go to level 4 in the mine. The deepest was level 17. I cannot even imagine how unpleasant it must have been down there as it was already pretty horrible where we were, as you can probably tell by the state of me in this photo.

 

 

 

 

We continued through the mine, tunnels opening out into large caverns where kids as young as 14 were pulling bags of rocks up to the surface by hand on a dangerous looking pulley system rigged up to the unstable rock formations. They were there working during the school holidays apparently. Although once their legal responsibility with the state education system ended, they would certainly join the co-operative that all the miners belong to. The guide informed us that if you managed to work down here for 15 years you could retire on a pension funded by the co-operative but that by that time, even if you make it to 15 years, you are almost guaranteed to have a terminal lung complaint.

Imagine a such a lack of options that you had to, knowingly, shorten your life by 20 years just so that you could afford to feed your family. The workers in the mine do earn almost double the average wage in Bolivia so you can understand why so many make the decision to work there. Whether or not double the money is worth it, is a different question altogether.

 

Because of the omnipresent danger that working in this mine exposes the workers to, they are a spiritual and superstitious bunch. Walking and crawling kilometres through the mines' tunnel network to visit statues of 'uncle' or 'tio' as they call him. Tio is a representation of the devil that gets the blame for the horrors that happen so often so deep underground.  Cigarettes, bags of coca leaves and miniature bottles of spirits surround the crudely constructed monument whose proud triangular penis pointed upwards as though seeking out the light so far above.

 

We were only underground for a couple of hours, an eighth of the standard shift worked by the miners, but we got an insight into what must surely be some of the worst working conditions that human beings have to suffer anywhere in the world. It really was an eye opener. So thoroughly unpleasant. And how much money do you think makes it worthwhile to endure these conditions? Roughly 10 of your English pounds.

 

Next stop, La Paz







Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia - The Largest Salt Flats in the World

After packing up and taking another alarming shower we headed out and found our bus to Uyuni. The bus was over an hour late setting off. We would eventually come to expect this as standard and even romantically mythologise about the days of buses 'only' being an hour late when we realised quite how bad the public transport in Bolivia really is.

After the locals lashed their tyres, barrels of cooking oil, bags of Coca, chickens and a fridge to the top of the bus and stowed the rucksacks, sacks of grain, a chest of drawers and yet more Coca underneath it, we eventually set off through Villazon, stopping briefly to pick up a man with a huge satellite dish tied to his back. And we were off.

The driver was obviously skilled and by our standards was not driving fast, but when you looked out of the windows and saw sheer drops, hundreds of feet, straight down, just inches away from the wheels of your rickety bus, 30 kmph makes it feel like you're on the back of an irresponsible Ducatti riders poorly maintained bike. We were glued to the windows, silently planning our escapes if the bus did suddenly start to roll, gently at first but soon gathering speed, down the skree.



Periodically, we would stop to let people off or pick people up, but we never saw any villages. It was surreal. They would get off, shoulder huge bags of grain and set off into the vast expanses of wilderness. We came to the conclusion that they must be walking tens of miles to get back to their villages as the horizons on all sides were completely clear of any kind of settlements. It must be an exceedingly hard life. Although it looked incredibly harsh and unforgiving, the area has a kind of quiet beauty that is difficult to describe. The altitude means that few living things, with the exception of humans and their livestock, tend to live there and when we got off the bus the only sound was the bluster of the wind in your ears. I'm trying desperately not use the word 'lunar' to describe it, but I suppose the reason so many people do, is because that is exactly what it looks like.



We stopped off in a couple of towns along the way for food and 'comfort' breaks. This one was probably the most sizeable but had nothing comfortable about it. Nothing.





After one of the most uncomfortable and exciting journeys we'd ever had (barring our Greyhound bus journey earlier on in the year) we arrived in Uyuni. A short wander later and, after finding our digs and booking a tour around the salt flats and surrounding areas the next day, as well as seeing a man punch a dog in the street, we bedded down for the night. What has Bolivia got in store for us next we asked ourselves. The answer was some absolutely incredible shit.

The tour picked us up bright and early the next morning. Before the main event of the Salt Flats we had a pretty impressive undercard to get through. First stop a steam train which had somehow arrived into the middle of one of the most barren areas in the world and had got itself stuck. Our guide wasn't much help when we asked for some kind of explanation. He just upped the volume on his portable radio and wound up the window, so we could only imagine why this train had been left to sink into the earth, which was so mineral rich it sparkled in the sunlight.

We then took a little detour to swap our angry guide with a friendly one and his mate, who was supposedly the cook. Although we worked out throughout the trip that he was was no such thing. He was nice enough, but took up a seat and a half in an already crowded 4x4. No matter we thought, this is Bolivia, at least he isn't carrying a cage with 6 chickens in it. Onwards to the Salt Flats. We had the obligotary souvenir stop to negotiate first, but the sales techniques I saw involved, among other things; sleeping, chatting on mobiles and ignoring the tourists, so it wasn't as aggressive as running the gauntlet of gift shops in SE Asia or India. Al paca woolen goods, and statues carved from salt cluttered the tables we walked past before we got back in the car and motored towards the Salt Flats. We had heard that they were flooded due to unseasonally heavy rains and, having only seen photos of them completely dry, were a little concerned that we may be arriving into some kind of quagmire that could be viewed only from within the vehicle. We needn't have worried though as when we stopped on its outer edge, this was the view that greeted us.

It was absolutely beautiful. The water which sat on the surface was perfectly clear and varied from ankle to shin deep. When the 4x4 stopped for a while it created a mirroring effect which actually confused the brain with its vastness. For 270 degrees, all we could see was the reflection of the perfectly blue andean sky. We asked to sit on the roof of the car for the journey to the hotel made entirely of salt where we would be stopping for lunch. A hotel made entirely of salt sounds a lot more impressive than it actually turned out to be. When we got there, it transpired that actually, it was just a shoddy building, cobbled together with blocks of salt that had browned gently over the years giving the impression that sewage was leaking into the foundations and seeping throughout the structure. We spent about an hour eating and then drove further into the 10 000 square kilometres of what is effectively the largest salt mine in the world. People still work, as they have for centuries digging huge piles of salt to be refined for dinner tables and kitchens throughout the world.

If we thought our bus driver was skilled he wasn't a patch on our new guide. The guy had an almost telepathic understanding of the tracks we were driving on. Veering suddenly onto an invisible path, he took us to our next destination. Some weird rock formations that I really cannot for the life of me recall the name of. Apparently they were dead old though.

We were gradually going further and further above sea level the more we drove and by the time we got to our next stop we were over 5000m above sea level which, to give you an idea, is near enough as high as the Everest Base Camp which sits at 5364m. I'd suffer the dull ache which had started in the centre of my skull again if I was guaranteed a view like this again, however.

It started snowing shortly after this picture was taken, which was weird considering that when we were on the salt flats just a few hours before, the thermometer was touching 30C but that's altitude for you, gives you a headache, makes you feel sick and then starts to snow a bit. Laguna Verde next (Green Lagoon) which is so inhospitable to life it glows green with unkind minerals to warn off potential inhabitants and the thirsty.

After a brief stop on the border of Chile to drop off one of our party, a particularly mouthy Brazilian, we made our way to a lake which is home to flocks of flamingos, which I had no idea lived at these altitudes but as you can see by the next photo, they don't only live but thrive there.

We had to make it to our accommodation after this and the next day we were simply driving back to Uyuni, but almost on the stroke of nightfall it started to snow extremely heavily. The roads weren't roads, they weren't even tracks, they were grooves cut into the mud since the last rains so this is when our guide displayed almost super human driving ability. I was sitting in the front seat so I could see everything he could, which was practically nothing. I'm not exaggerating when I say that visibility couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 feet in front of the 4x4. I was now suffering quite extensively with altitude sickness, a thumping headache and almost overwhelming nausea were threatening to force me to open the window and return my rice and mystery meat to the land from whence they came until the adrenalin kicked in. He honestly must have been driving the tracks from memory because I really couldn't see a single thing. His driving really was astonishing. I think he was also a little tense as, when we arrived and after prising my hand from the door frame where I'd been grimly holding on for dear life, I turned to him and said 'increible' (incredible) and he responded by letting out a whoop of joy and high fiving me. I was starting to get the impression that if you embarked on a journey, in any vehicle, in Bolivia, there was a very real chance that it could, quite easily, end with you trapped in mangled wreckage at the bottom of a ravine. This however, also made for extremely exciting times and that, after all, is what travelling is all about.

Next stop Potosi and a visit to a mine that has claimed 8 million lives in its 500 or so years of operation.