Sucre, Potosi and the Silver Mines

On Friday morning we left the hospital and took a 45 minute flight with 'Aerosur' to Sucre, the judicial capital of Bolivia. The flight was an interesting experience. La Paz airport is situated at 4,200m on the altiplano above the city and is the highest international airport in the world. It's not often you take off at over half your cruising altitude! We needed the whole runway to take off and about 100m off the ground the plane had to bank and turn tightly to avoid the surrounding mountains! The landing was equally as exciting/nerve-racking as the plane had to again negotiate it's way through the mountains in order to line up correctly with the runway at Sucre. Despite the excitement and the fact that our plane was about 40 years old, the flight was fine and we were very glad we had paid the 35 pounds each to take the 45min flight so as to avoid an unpleasant 18 hour mountainous local bus journey!

We transferred to our hotel and headed straight for the main town squre, the Plaza 25 de Mayo where we boarded the 'Dino Truck' to visit the fossilised dinosaur tracks at Cal Orck'o, just outside the city and next to an enormous quarry. The truck was exceedingly touristy, with hard wooden benches, open sides and mock dinosaur claws on the roof. We were guided around a small, modern visitors centre laden with numerous lifesize dinosaur models (complete with tacky roaring sounds) before heading to the main quarry wall which contains the footprints. The huge wall used to lie horizontal as tropical marshland and has been pushed vertical over the last 68 million years. Criss-crossed all over the wall are different dinosaur footprints which we spent time examining through binoculars... it was quite fascinating. The wall is of great paleoentological significance as it contains more tracks than anywhere else to be found in the world and UNESCO will be designating it a World Heritage Site this year and funding work to preserve the footprints.

In the afternoon we wandered the streets of the city. Sucre is known as 'La Ciudad Blanca' due to the number of old white colonial buildings and is designated a World Heritage Centre by UNESCO. The centre is beautiful and replete with splendid colonial architecture, churches and green open parks (one of which bizarrely contains a replica of the Eiffel Tower). It is also full of lawyers offices as it is the judicial capital of Bolivia and appears considerably more wealthy than many of the places we have visited so far. We took a late lunch in a small cafe on the main square, sitting up against one of the windows opening onto the square. We ordered soup and a plate of chips and as we finished a scruffily-dressed little girl of about 7 years old approached the window begging. Assuming she was after money we both said 'Vamos! Vamos!' to ask her to go away but she persisted. Ash suddenly realised that she was actually asking for the five chips we had left on our plate so we let her have them. We looked on as she took them across the road and shared them out with her mother and three younger siblings who wolfed them down! It was a really sad sight to see so Bi quickly held up her bowl of soup and offered it to the mother who very quickly pulled out a plastic container from her shawl and brought it over. We watched as she took her family into the centre of the park, sat down on the ground and shared out the soup. After we left the restaurant Ash stopped at a stall and bought a big packet of biscuits and took them over to the family. They were beaming!

In the evening, the city was totally buzzing and we wandered around the central Sucre market, and as always it was fascinating to see the varied food stalls. The stall holders love to fiddle and play around with the food to make it look more presentable such as peeling the onions and garlic, halving the avocados, making swirly patterns all over the orange peels, pulling apart herbs into perfectly neat piles.. they just can't leave things as they are... even on the crisps stand they are regularly running their blackened hands through the produce to fluff up the display. We topped off the evening with a decent meal before heading back to our hotel to get rugged up in our woollies and into bed. Very few places have heating here, not even the expensive hotels and so it can get quite chilly in the night.

On Saturday we decided to skip our morning bus to Potosi and stay another day relaxing in Sucre. We had a well earned lie in, took a gentle wander through the streets, ate good food (we found a nice Dutch-run cafe and stuck to it for breakfast, lunch and dinner) and did something very normal.... we both got haircuts for 1 pound 75p each, which we sorely needed! You do indeed get what you pay for!!

On Sunday, after an exciting breakfast of a banana and an anti-parasite tablet each (!) we took a 3.5 hr bus ride to Potosi, another UNESCO World Heritage Site and the world's highest city at 4,060m (as opposed to La Paz which is the World's highest capital). The journey took us through high-sided mountains and deep canyons, past basic and dusty villages where the locals were out herding their animals and washing their clothes in the streams. When we arrived at Potosi's main bus station our hearts sank as the city appeared to be very basic and under-developed, especially in comparison to Sucre. We took a short (unavoidably unlicensed) taxi ride to the hotel in the colonial centre and were relieved to be dropped off with all our belongings, and equally relieved to find the centre to be pretty and peaceful.

Potosi is set against the backdrop of a rainbow-coloured mountain called 'Cerro Rico' and the city's primary attraction is a visit to the Silver Mines (not as exotic as it sounds!). After settling into our extremely cold hotel we wandered around the town although being a Sunday it was very quiet and nothing was open. It gets extremely cold here in the night, so we were rugged up in all our thermals, hats and gloves when we climbed into bed in our non-heated room!

This morning we visited the Silver Mines, which are buried high above the city in the Cerro Rico mountain. The experience was shocking, gruelling and memorable... exactly as described in our guidebook. At 8.30am we were taken by bus to a house where we changed into protective clothing which included jacket, trousers, boots, bandana (to breathe through), helmet and light. We were then taken to the Miners' Street Market where we purchased dynamite (!), fuses, coca leaves and soft drinks as gifts for the miners. The miners chew on the coca leaves to help deal with the lack of ventilation in the shafts. From the market we visited a mineral processing plant where we saw silver, zinc and lead being refined from the ore extracted from the mountain. We were then driven up to Cerro Rico where we entered the mine for around 2 hours. We made our way into the dark mine, scrambling and crawling our way through low, narrow, unventilated and dirty shafts, and climbed rickety ladders. It was exhausting and claustrophobic work, especially with the lack of air and myriad of chemicals that made breathing difficult. Arsenic, silicon, asbestos and carbon monoxide are all heavily present in the air, so much so that the miners often die within 10 years of entering the mine suffering from silicosis pneumonia. It was genuinely stifling and distinctly unpleasant and frightening when we were crawling through tight spaces hardly wider or taller than our bodies on all fours. We descended 3 levels into the mine and saw various groups of miners hard at work. We saw one family of Father and 3 sons all shovelling ore into baskets and carts. Although it is illegal to work in the mines under the age of 18, there is no formal policing so children as young as 8 can be found working as gophers. Our guide started at the age of 10 through to 15 and now suffers from silicosis. His father was killed in an accident in the mine 2 years ago. There are currently 15,000 miners working as a cooperative, with each miner reaping in the rewards of his own find by selling it back to the cooperative. The conditions that they work in are absolutely shocking and safety is non-existent. We were all uncomfortable and couldn't wait to get out, let alone work in there from 8am-6pm, 6 days a week.

The air never tasted so sweet as we exited the mines coughing and spluttering, our hands and protective clothes covered with arsenic. We were relieved to be out and afterwards treated to a lesson in how to set off dynamite! We removed the nitro-glycerine from its wrapper, rolled it into balls with ammonium nitrate, added the fuse, lit the fuse...... took our pictures with the fuse burning before the guides legged it to detonate the dynamite from a safe distance. Typical South America! We returned very tired and grubby, dived into the shower and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing around Potosi.

Tomorrow we take an arduous 7 hour bus journey to Uyuni where we will pick up a 3 day jeep tour of the Bolivian Salt Flats and finish by crossing the border into Chile... and sanctuary!