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We arrived in Potosi with low expectations, having been told by several people that we should just get in, do the mine tour, and get the the hell out, not even spend a night! Actually we really liked Potosi, the town was pretty nice, overlooked by the massive Cerro Rico, although we did all feel the effects of the altitude (Potosi is 4090m, one of the highest cities in the world and the highest we'd been so far!)
The mines are crazy! Before you go in you buy gifts for the miners from the miners market: sticks of dynamite that cost about 50p and are available to everyone (apparently little kids sometimes buy them and blow them up on the street!) and 96% alcohol! I tried this later on in the trip and its actually not that bad!
Inside the mines the heat is almost unbearable at times and the size of the passages varies from being able to walk through to sliding yourself through on your stomach! The miners blow holes in the walls with dynamite and push their own carts full of rocks by hand. A lot of parts we literally had to rock climb or slide down on our bums!
The mines are a cooperative so the miners work in groups with no formal wage but get all the money they make from the silver they find and choose their own working hours. The mines are full of toxic chemicals and the average life of a miner is only mid thirties, but its the best paid job in Potosi so many people still do it!
We headed off to Tupiza as we were gonna do the 4 day salt flats tour up to Uuyni. The overnight bus we got that we were told would arrive around 7am actually arrived at about 3am, and as we had no reservation for that night we spent a fun hour traipsing around in the dark to every hostel, banging on doors, being told there was no space, and ended up being taking to a hostel by a dodgy guy who for some reason was up at 3am sweeping leaves from the front garden of another hostel into a bag and carrying them away to his hostel! We managed to get our tour booked, during which time I realised I had lost my bankcard (I'd left it in a cash machine in Potosi 3 days earlier!) which led to my eventual 4 week stay in La Paz!
Tupiza's a bit of a nothing town, but the scenery around it is pretty amazing. We did a 5 hour horse ride through some huge red and orange canyons dotted with giant cacti, it was very cool, and the horses had really funny personalities! One of them refused to let any of the others in front, and all of them would just sporadically decide to start trotting or galloping! I had a scary few seconds when my horse decided to sprint off down a hill and I wasn't paying attention or holding on and thought I was gonna fall off! But I didn't and we all made it back in one piece, ready for our tour the next day!
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