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Day 40 - Saturday 10th April
13 hours sleep later I felt just about well enough to catch my first Bolivian bus, an extremely bumpy affair with bags on the roof alongside a table and set of chairs, and the road frequently blocked by llamas, donkeys or ostriches!!
Arriving in Potosi, the worlds highest city we found a quaint little hostel and headed into town. We ate at a really nice (if slightly touristy) and I tried Llama for the first time!! Basically very similar to a pork loin if slightly chewier...
A quick tour of the markets before bed.
Day 41 - Sunday 11th April
Had a great muesli breakfast in a little cafe nextdoor to the hostel run by a sweet little woman before heading on the mines tour!! Potosi grew to be the richest South American city and funded the Spanish conquistadors through it's rich silver deposits. Around 8 million Indian and African slaves are thought to have died in the mines over the years and still people work in terrible conditions scraping a living off the remaining slivers of deposits. A harrowing visit but given that the miners don't work on Sundays it wasn't quite the encephalitis others like Andrea and Jamie had had. All the same it was fun to don full mining gear, sip 96% alcohol, give some to mother earth (women don't work in the mine itself so as not to make her jealous - lazy I say), blow smoke in the devil Tio's face for protection, clamber around on our hands and knees and hold lit dynamite in my mouth...
For the afternoon we'd heard about some more thermal baths outside the city so we got a taxi driver to take us out to the middle of nowhere to find them. A beautiful valley...but the thermal bath turned out to just be a small local indoor swimming pool, packed with locals. It was thermally heated but not...quite what we were expecting. Anyway since we were there we ended up playing volleyball with the locals (sadly we lost) and left mildly bemused.
Went up a tower to catch the sunset over the valley of Potosi and caught a late and bloody freezing bus to La Paz.
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