The Potosi Mine

Before I start it's worth giving you a bit of context to this mine 'tour'. It's in Potosi which is in the highest city in the world. Miners as young as 14 work there if they're deemed 'strong' and from their start date they have a life expectancy of a further 15 years due to the conditions they work in.

This is a dangerous, working mine. A maze of cramped tunnels requiring some agility just to get to around. It's dark, dusty and smelly. There's nowhere else in the world that would have EVER let tourist go into this mine...only in Bolivia!!!

We started the day in a minibus with our guide Chaski, an ex miner aged 28 but looked closer to 40! The tour consisted of 4 English and 2 Brazilians. Chaski took us first to the miners market, an area where the miners go for supplies and we could buy gifts for them.

At the Market the gifts on offer were coca leaves, 98% alcohol, cognac, dynamite and orange squash. We were encouraged to buy a bit of everything which cost about £3. Our guide explained that mother earth 'Pachamama' is really the only God they care about (there's Catholicism from the Spanish too but was enforced). Therefore everything they use or consume in the mine has to be pure I.e pure alcohol, coca leaves, no food equals good quality minerals for them.

So with our plastic bag of goodies (and slight nervousness about carrying dynamite) we got kitted out in overalls, wellies and head lamps and headed to the entrance to the mine.

Walking crouched over along a rail track heading deep into the mountain, the combination of the air thinning, the dust, the air rushing in the overhead pipes (sounded suspiciously like a gas leak) made us all quite nervous and little on edge. We sat down in a small cave where a shrine of the mountain devil (part of Pachamama) resides. We had to give it an offering of coca leaves, alcohol (also having a swig ourselves) and a couple of cigarettes whilst asking it to protect us in the mine.

Armed with a taste of 98% alcohol running through our veins, we continued deeper and all felt much better. Taking on a Krypton Factor style assault course for the next 20 minutes we eventually ended up in a tiny cave with a huge amount of dust and three equally dusty miners.

The miners were boring holes ready for the insertion of dynamite. We stayed briefly in this inhospitable environment and then made our way '1 floor' down where it was less dusty.

Between us we'd bought about 5 bottles of alcohol, cigarettes and coca leaves. The miners shortly followed to join us in our cave. They started mixing the alcohol with orange juice then we were required to take a shot of the very potent liquid, pour a bit on the ground for mother earth and then knock back the rest. As you can imagine we all got pretty merry very quickly and it was only 11am!!

Suddenly out of nowhere there was a huge boom, feeling the force of the explosion right through your body...then another . The dynamite from the dusty upstairs cave was going off. We were all quite jumpy when our guide explained that we were quite safe in our cave - i'm glad he was so confident!!

After the explosions we made our way out of the cave and down the tunnel towards the light, it didn't seem anywhere near as dark and daunting as when we came in. The question is had we grown more confident or had the 98% alcohol given us more Dutch courage than we realised?!?






-- Posted from Miranda's iPhone