Uyuni

A brutal eight our bus ride from Potosi on mostly single wide dirt roads we finally reached the nothing special town of uyuni. The bus ride was unbelievably bad, with a huge portion of the road still under construction and the remainder primarily washboard that seemed to never end. Luckily we had the front seats, which were significantly less dusty, bumpy, and noisy, but blasted by the sun. Despite the unbearable quality of the roads, the trip was probably through the most beautiful country side we had seen thus far. We saw more llamas on that ride then we saw on the rest of our travels combined and passed through surreal canyons of orange rock, white sand, and green grass…it was a wild frontier indeed with few inhabitants and vast amounts on space gorgeous mountains…the kinds of places you’d love to just get dropped off and explore.

Upon our arrival, we shopped around at the numerous tour agencies to arrange a trip to the salt flats and the various other attractions of the area. We finally settled on one the following morning and were paired up with two kiwis, a brit, and one guy from japan. We all piled into a landcruiser, the tour vehicle of choice, along with our driver “the godfather” and our cook and before we had a chance to really think things through we were on our way to the first destination, the abandoned railroad cars just outside of town.
We rolled up to a dirt parking lot along with another dozen land cruisers from different tours and it became immediately apparent how touristy our trip was about to be, and how rushed, when the driver told us we had twelve minutes to look around. There were probably thrity or so cars left to rust away out in the desert where apparently a train headed for peru and a train headed for chile collided a number of years back. The place was pretty cool in an apocalyptic sort of way, but to swarmed with tourists to get any clean shots.
From there we raced out to the salt flats with a brief stop in a little village where they gathered salt from the flats and sold touristy whatnots. It was pretty awesome once we got out onto the flats to see salt workers piling up the salt into big mounds for drying then shoveling into huge trucks to take away to sell. It was fun to walk around in the shallow water and get covered in salt. From there it was off to the salt hotel, which was made entirely of slabs of salt and was totally amazing and kitschy.
Next we headed out across the endless flats to what seemed like nowhere. It was trippy to drive across, and looked like a giant frozen lake covered in snow, and I couldn’t help but feel like we were going to break through at any moment. Some areas of the flats were covered in a thin layer of water, which made it feel like we were more in a boat then a car…it was quite bizarre, but obviously very beautiful, but blindingly bright.
The highlight of the salt flats was the cactus covered island that we drove a 100km out across the flats to reach. The rock of the island was all fossilized coral from when the flats were underwater, and the primary plant are these giant cacti that were over twenty feet tall and up to 1,500 years old. On top of that, the entire island was surrounded by nothing but white salt with huge volcanoes and snow covered mountains off in the distance. We had lunch at the island with the accompaniment of a giant emu and heaps of other tourists. After lunch everyone took pictures out on the flats playing optical tricks with size and distance which was quite entertaining to watch.
We left the island and headed off to the hills where we stayed in a small salt hotel outside a tiny village overlooking the flats. We had dinner with the group and got to know each other…turned out to be a pretty entertaining crew. That night we went to see the stars which were crazy clear given our altitude and the dryness of the environment…the stars sparkled like fireflies...and we all agreed they were the clearest skies we’d ever scene…completely magical.
We got up at sunrise the following morning and the jeep ride began….out across salt flats, past active volcanoes, rainbow colored mineral mountain ranges, and huge barren valleys with zero foliage…it was very surreal…like driving out across mars or something….with just about as much oxygen at our record 15,000 feet. There were giant rocks out in the middle of know where, wild pecunians running about, bazaar moss looking coral like blimpy green something growing on the rocks, massive lave flows, multicolored lagoons filled with pink flamingos, geysers, hotsprings, snow peaked mountains, and three days of the worst roads ive ever endured. We off roaded something like 500km in three days, all the way south to the border of chile where we dropped off some passengers, looping back up through the unbelievable landscapes past frontier towns, borax mines, and the most amazing maze of lava flow ever. It was completely unbelievable and abusive and exhausting…spring got altitude sickness pretty bad, as well as I, along with food poisoning and fevers…it was an experience for sure…something to remember and something to be so happy to be over with. Go! But be warned…and get a really good jeep and safe driver!

Potosi

About five hours uphill from sucre through beautiful mountains and high plains, on a super sketchy bus that broke down three times on the way, we arrived in Potosi to the fanciest bus terminal ive ever seen. We got at taxi to the old part of town, which is quite beautiful, with colonial architecture, elaborate churches, and narrow cobble stone streets…the major drawback being the but horribly pollution from over congestion of vehicles….mostly buses…which all happen to come from japan, indicated by the Japanese characters still present on them. We walked around town for half the day and copped some new shades, then went on a tour of the minting museum.

The museum was quite amazing, not so much because of its art…but because it was the original building used to make coins from all the silver coming out of cerro rico mountain that were then shipped all over the world for use as different currencies. They had an incredibly elaborate and enormous wooden contraption used to stamp coins that consisted of numerous huge wheels turned by horses that was two stories tall and a bit of a mystery of how it functioned. There was also an amazing room filled with about fifty display cases of all the minerals extracted from Bolivia…literally thousands of varieties…some being very exotic looking. There were also many other rooms with various other machines used for minting coins that spanned few hundred year period and many different levels of technology and lack there of.
Cerro Rico
The most remarkable thing however that I did in potosi was visit the active mines of cerro rico that are very famous for their incredible silver deposits and made potosi at one time the wealthiest and supposedly largest city in the world. The mines are contained in the huge mountain that looms at the outskirts of city…it is referred to as the mountain that eats men, and has claimed an estimated 8,000,000 lives over four hundred year history of its pillage. The life expectancy of the average miner is around 35 to 40 years old…most of them dying from silicosis…a lung disease caused by the excessive dust in the mines. There are currently four hundred operational mines within the mountain with about five thousand miners working around the clock…the number of workers is based on the market value for the minerals at that time…when the prices are high the number of workers will soar to 15,000, and when they are low around 2,000. Each mine connects to the next from the peak all the way down under the city of potosi, making it a miracle that the whole thing hasn’t collapsed in on itself yet…but I expect it soon will. With all that in mind, I somehow I thought it was still a good idea to go check it out, and signed up for a five hour tour.
The tour started with a visit to one of the many miner shops that stock hardhats, shovels, headlamps, rubber boots, 96% alcohol for a dollar per liter, and of course dynamite…which anyone can buy, regardless of age or intention. The guide told us that the weakest dynamite is used mostly for parties and riots and the stronger stuff is usually paired with fertilizer packets to strengthen the blast and comes with a detonator for $3 US…it was highly recommended that we buy dynamite as gifts to the miners, so we all did. From there we went to the miners market where we bought coca leaves...chewed incessantly by the miners in giant wades to lessen fatigue and curb appetite. From the market we picked up the necessary clothing, hardhats, rubber boots, and headlamps for our mission inside the mines. Next we stopped at a processing plant to see how the silver was extracted into a purer form using a series of machines for crushing, washing, and drying based on a foam bath technique where the lighter silver flows out in the suds and the heavier debris is discarded….however we discovered that the entire process is not very efficient as for every 20 tons of minerals carried out of the mine, only about 20 kilos go to use. From here we drove a ways further up the mountain to a number of rock huts used for shelter and storage that overlooked the city of potosi…it was here that we made our entance into hell.
Being in the mines was one of the most extreme and unbearable experiences of my life. It was cold and raining when we reached the mine so there wasn’t much introduction…we just charged right in. The first tunnel was large enough in most places to stand straight with some minimal ducking under the cracking wooded support beams and hissing air tubes that powered the drills. It was super dusty and rank from the beginning with a strange aroma of must, piss, coca leaves, and minerals. We carried on rapidly, quickly losing our breathes before resting near a drilling station. We all had handkerchiefs to try and block the profuse amounts of dust, but with the lack of oxygen from the altitude and from being in the mine, often it was nearly impossible to breathe. When the miners finished drilling we slide past them down a long slippery and narrow tunnel past deep shafts to a “dodgy” ladder with loose rungs hanging on by single nails. The ladder connected us to another larger passage filled with ankle deep water that we blindly stumbled through before reaching another ladder leading further into the mines.
Each level was hotter than the previous, with seemingly less oxygen, and a greater sense of panic. The deepest level we reached there was barely enough room to crawl on our hands and knees. There was a single man hammering a spike into the ceiling which he would then plug with dynamite, explode, gather, smash into smaller bits, and carry to the surface on his back…he started at seven that morning, and would return home around ten that evening…he worked six days a week…and was roughly forty…he had labored this way for the past fifteen years...feeling sorry for the poor guy, we gave him a gift of dynamite and orange soda before crawling off. At this point it had been roughly an hour and we had all had enough…the dust and dangers, ducking and exhaustion got old real fast…we agreed to see a few more sights then get the fuck out. From there we had to climb a near vertical chasm up about two hundred feet up to another level… the heat, altitude, and dust made it pure torture and we were all cursing ourselves for going on the tour.
Eventually we arrived at the “tio,” a shrine dedicated to the demon that rules over the mines and is highly feared and respected by all the miners. Each mine has at least one tio with approximately a thousand shrines in total. The miners pray to the tio which is usually a mud sculpture with a face and horns looking somewhat like the devil. They offer him alcohol, cigarettes, coca leaves, and marijuana and adorn him with various confetti’s and streamers. At certain parts of the year llamas are sacrificed and their blood is splattered over the entrance of the mines so the tio doesn’t drink the blood of the miners. So not only is are the mines like hell to be in, but the god that sees over them is also the devil.
We sat around our tio and offered it whisky, cigarettes, and coca leaves as the guide answered our various questions and educated us on cerro rico. We learned that the miners are very aware of their fate, to most likely die young and poor, and have all made the conscious decision to sacrifice their lives for their families and for wealth. We learned that most miners work for themselves which means that if they don’t find a good vein of minerals they make no money…but if they are lucky they can make thousands and sometimes even millions…like one super miner who now owns ten houses, thirty three cars, and a professional soccer team. Other miners, who aren’t so lucky, like our guides father, mined for thirty years and never found a good vein and died of silicosis very poor. The other option is to work for a large company that pays an hourly wage and has benefits, but never allows for the worker to strike it rich…which I imagine is the only hope that keeps them going.
We found out that nobody owns the mountain and wherever a miner starts to dig, from that point forward is his…the main tunnels are like city streets and each off shoot like the entrance to the miners house. Sometimes however, the miners don’t respect this concept and try to steal from each other…often conflicts are settled in the mines, and thieves are at risk of being blown up by dynamite or thrown down mine shafts to their deaths. Not exactly the kind of place you want to bring your children, however hundreds of children are currently working in the mines, many as young as ten years old. Its tragedy and a horror, and we couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there, especially after one of us asked “with all these mines isn’t the mountain at risk of caving in on itself” and the guides reply was “were surprised it hasn’t already” as a few explosions rumbled over our heads.
By the time we finally reached the exit from hell, we were all stumbling and exhausted and covered toxic dust. The most amazing thing was the fresh cool air, one thing that ive always pretty much taken for granted, and never again will. We were only in the mine for about two hours, but all felt lucky to still be alive, and were completely amazed by the strength, perseverance, and insanity of the miners who often work double shifts of 24hrs before heading home. We all agreed that we would rather be criminals than work in the mines, because spending a life in jail would be better than spending it in cerro rico. We blew up our remaining dynamite on the hillside outside the mine, laughed at each other’s stained teeth from the coca, made our way backed down the mountain, and were completely fucking mind blown by the whole experience.

Sucre

A wonderful surprise from our mostly unpleasant introduction to Bolivia, Sucre is a beautiful colonial city full of white walls and tiled roofs, and probably the nicest cities we’ve visited so far. The city has a huge student population and is brimming with young people. There’s a beautiful central plaza surrounded by some outstanding architecture and restaurants that serves as the main focal point of the city. Probably the most amazing aspect of sucre was the cemetery…very old with incredible gardens and a maze ofgraves…we liked it so much we visited twice. We also visited the local indigenous museum which was pretty outstanding….including some of the most incredible textiles ive ever seen…painstakingly demonstrated on site by some indigenous women thread by thread. There was also a budget video on display depicting various celebrations and rituals from the neighboring tribal groups…totally amazing…Bolivia is wonderfully diverse in regards to its colorful rural communities…most of which are completely inaccessible to travelers without their own mode of transportation however…which was quite frustrating. We did manage to visit one rural community called tarabuco though for their weekend market. It was awesome to go to the museum and learn about all these different indigenous groups then go to the market and see them in full effect…dressed completely traditionally and looking so rad…worth the trip, but unfortunately swarmed with tourists.