Potosi

Right now I am sitting in front of the computer in an internet cafe in the highest city in the world, Potosi. It is a three-hours bus ride from Sucre, a steep ride uphill on bad roads through the Andes all the way to some 4100 meters. I don't think I have ever been this high up and I was very worried about altitude sickness, but I am happy to say that so far I did not get any of the horrible symptoms graphically described in our guidebooks. You do, however, feel that any physical activity requires much more energy: this morning I panicked when climbing up two flights of stairs left me completely breathless. The solution is to do everything much more slowly and to drink tea made of coca leaves, which is supposed to give you energy and dull the pain caused by pretty much anything.

Potosi is a mining town and was one of the major sources of wealth in colonial times because of the tons and tons of silver extracted by the enslaved Indians from the vast silver mines. Today, there is not that much silver left, but they still mine for zinc and silver and we went to visit one of the mines on a guided tour. The tour involved walking down to a depth of some 35 meters, at times crawling on our knees and climbing up steep alleys, and inhaling a lot of dust. It was amazing though: we could hear the explosions of dynamites really close-by and saw some of the miners at work; this truly seems like the hardest and most stressful job ever. Apparently the conditions are now much better than they were before the 1952 miner revolt, before which all the mines were in private ownership and there was hardly any state regulation (and, accordingly, no safety requirements at all). Now these mines are cooperatives and the activity is regulated but it still seems like a pretty grim existence. Some of the men we met were barely 18 and they spend 8-10 hours a day shoving huge barrows full of minerals up and down the dark alleyways and they get paid only based on how much they mine. The only way they can actually survive this is by chewing coca leaves (they all look like hamsters because they store the leaves in their mouths all day), drinking an almost 100 per cent. alcohol made of sugar cane, and smoking really strong cigarettes all the time. It was depressing but interesting and our guide was a very knowledgeable young man who also explained about the miners` religious rituals, which are a strange mix of Catholicism and the worship of ancient Indian gods and spirits. Evidently, the miners leave Catholicism behind before they go down making the sign of the cross at the point where the light disappears and from then on they worship the devil (called Tio, Spanish word for uncle), who, as Mother Earth`s husband (Pachamama!) is responsible for the minerals (and everything else presumably) under the face of the earth. They have one or two devil statues with huge penises (symbolizing fertility, of course) where the miners sometimes get together and "pray" for whatever it is that they need most.

Otherwise, the town is not as depressing as you would expect it to be: there is a cute center and you can observe once again how the trendy, western-looking people and the really traditional looking ones go about their business side by side. It is freezing cold at night though and the sun is burning during the day, so it is not exactly a classic holiday destination. There are some thermal baths around here that we will probably visit tomorrow, before going to an area in western Bolivia that is even higher and colder, but apparently amazingly beautiful.