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Hola,
We felt this activity deserved a blog of it´s own! For those of you who have been to South America, you will know instantly what we are about to describe when you hear the word Potosi. The highest city in the world at 4060m, it has been based on minerals in particular, Silver, for 100´s of years.
Tours of working Silver mines are the main attraction in this town (which was once the wealthiest town in the whole continent, but is now facing it´s total demise in the next 20 years as the Silver runs dry).
To quote the Lonely Planet, ´today, thousands continue to work in the mines......in spine chilling conditions. A visit to the mines is demanding, shocking and memorable. Tours involve scrambling and crawling in low, narrow, dirty shafts and climbing ricketing ladders. Working practices are medieval, safety provisions nearly non existent and most shafts are unventilated. Anyone undertaking a tour needs to understand there are risks involved......if you´re undeterred you´ll have an eye opening and unforgettable experience´.
This captures the experience perfectly. We spent 90 minutes underground, having first bought soft drinks, coca leaves and dynamite as presents for any miners that we saw whilst underground (we met a few groups, all men work in family co-operatives - they very much appreciated these presents). The lack of safety precautions (live cables, oxygen pipes, water, mud, miners drinking 96% alcohol underground, old wooden safety beams and the range of noxious chemicals that you have to breath in) all contribute to a miners maximum life span being 55 years of age with lung diseases the main cause of premature death.
Our guide, a miner himself, was excellent and made us realise that in the city of Potosi, mining is the main source of employment for men in the town, all men are aware of the risks and deal with it through humour and a fatalistic outlook on life. It really made us realise how fortunate we are in our working and living conditions and the fact that a well off miner is earning 1000 Boliviano´s ($200 and 100 pounds) a month.
We were never more happy than when we breathed fresh air outside the mine again and enjoyed our guides detonation demonstrations with the additional dynamite we had purchased ($4 a stick!). We even had a chance to hold live dynamite ourselves before it went off.
Hope the photos give some idea of what was an unforgettable experience.
Love Mal and Nat
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