Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
12th - 14th October 2008: We arrive in Potosi at 5am and luckily the hostel let us in to watch tv until our rooms are ready. Potosi is a very pretty small city, crumbling at the edges but with it´s own charm. Cerro Rico mountain dominates the local landscape, it is the mountain that made Potosi rich with silver and other minerals - and why the Spanish wanted to keep Bolivia for so long! In the evening we watch a really good film called The Devil´s Miners, about two young boys, Basilio and Bartholomew, who work in the mines. It´s sobering to see the conditions they work in and how young they are. Many boys start in the mines at 10 or 11and often don´t live beyond 25. We have booked to do a tour of the mines tomorrow and the film is a great introduction to what it may be like.
The next morning we head off to meet our guide for the mines, Pedro. We get kitted up in our getching outfits of bolier suit, wellie boots and hard hats before heading off to the miners market to buy a few things for the miners. As the mine is a cooperative all the miners have to buy their own supplies, and if they don´t find any minerals they don´t make any money. We buy dynamite, soft drinks and coca leaves before heading off to Candlebra mine. Descending into the mine is very challenging and makes me face my fear of small spaces! We are squeezing through tiny gaps and down narrow channels, saying hello to passing miners along the way. We visit a small museum where there is also a ´Tio´ - who is worshipped as the God of the mines. In the film we watched it was explained that although the miners are catholics above ground, as soon as they descend into the mine they instead believe in Tio. Each mine has its own Tio and the miners make offerings of coca leaves and alcohol in order to keep Tio happy. We descend even further into the mine, reaching Level 3 until we decide that´s deep enough! We help the miners with their daily quota of 40 tonnes (!) before escaping into the fresh air! Once outside we help Pedro prepare one of our bags of dynamite so we can see how big the explosions are - we roll the dynamite into a ball before adding it to ammonium crystals and tying it in a bag with the fuse. It is quite scary to hold the bag with the lit fuse and I´m very glad to hand it back, especially when I see the size of the explosion it makes! We also visit the refinery to see the minerals being extracted before heading back for a welcome shower!
- comments