Potosí

On Wednesday I arrived in Potosí, which at 4070m above sea level is the highest city in the world. Potosí owes its existence to the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), which was discovered in the 16th century to contain silver ore. Potosí became the wealthiest city in Latin America, and the Cerro Rico mines apparently underwrote the Spanish economy for two centuries.

The mountain is still being mined today, but most of the silver has gone, so these days they extract mainly zinc and tin. And best of all, tourists are now allowed to visit the mines, so that’s what I did on Thursday morning. I went on the mine tour with four of the group with which I went on the Salar de Uyuni tour (Ben from Australia, Hanno from Germany, and Tamara and Alessandra from Switzerland). Here’s a picture of me ready to go down the mine.

It seems pretty crazy that tourists are allowed to go into an active mine where miners are regularly exploding dynamite, but I guess this is how things work in Bolivia. I think the only reason the miners put up with it is because everyone that goes on a mine tour is expected to take gifts with them to give to the miners, so before our tour we were taken to a shop where we bought things like dynamite, fuses, cigarettes, coca leaves and fruit juice.

Going down the mine was a pretty hairy experience - in some places the tunnel was not much more than a metre high, and we had to keep dodging out of the way of trolleys being pushed along by the miners. We also had to jump over a couple of deep holes where the floor had caved in. And to give you an idea of how crazy things are down there, Julio (our guide and a former miner) told us that if the tunnels being dug by two rival groups of miners ever happen to coincide, one group will try to drive the other group away by burning rubber boots and even lobbing small sticks of dynamite at them.

Here’s a picture of a miner packing dynamite into the rock face. Here’s a picture of Tamara and Alessandra down the mine, and another of Julio and Alessandra after the tour.

On the way back to town we stopped to look at the view of Potosí.

We also saw the miners’ football pitch, which Julio told us was the highest football pitch in the world.

In the afternoon I went for a walk around town to see the sights of Potosí, including the Cathedral and the Plaza 10 de Novembre.

In other news, I've had to go sock shopping because the hostel laundry lost all of my socks. And I've also now shaved off my beard because it was getting too irritating. I managed to block one of the hostel washbasins in the process, but I don't feel too bad about that, because they did lose all my socks. The beard may make a reappearance later in the trip.

After spending nearly a week travelling with Ben, Hanno, Tamara and Alessandra, we’ve now gone our separate ways, and I’ve moved onto Sucre, where I’m planning to take it easy for a couple of days.