Long way to go

I am in Potosi, wayyy up in the mountains, at about 4000 meters. I am doing much better with the altitude sickness though, taking sorojchi pills. (This is where I apologize for not providing more links; along with bad punctuation, it´s a byproduct of a foreign keyboard.) It´s raining right now, pretty sweet to watch the storm come in and thunder rip through the mountains.

Potosi, Bolivia, used to be a very wealthy town because of all the silver mines and old mints that were here. These days it is less prosperous, but more than eighty percent of the population still works in the mines.

This morning I took a tour of a silver mine, which turned out to be a lot more intense than I expected it to be. I felt a little strange, suiting up for education and entertainment alongside miners who do this their whole lives - most start around age 12. The tour was a lot more physical than I expected, lots of climbing up tiny shafts and crawling on hands and knees through miniature tunnels. Most Bolivians are just over four feet tall, and the mines were created by them. I barely fit, and I´m not very big.

Over the course of the mine tour we set off some dynamite, gave miners crackers and coca leaves, drilled holes, and spoke with the oldest miner there, age 64. He´d been working in the mines since he was 12, and said he would work there until he died. I´m not at all claustrophobic, but there were several points during the tour that I was ready to bolt, except the exit was really far away, through a series of tunnels I had no idea how to find my way through.

By the time we left the mine, I felt relieved. It was a very cool tour, kind of neat to crawl and climb around the guts of a mountain. But I couldn´t help but think of all the people that die there regularly, and that I am a very privileged person to be able to take a tour of a silver mine instead of work in one my whole life. It wasn´t exactly fun, but I am really glad I did it.

In the afternoon, after a quick lunch (yay for finally getting a bit of an appetite back) I went for a tour of the old mint with Christian, another American. It was a long tour, all in Spanish, with way too much Middle Ages religious art. Once we finally saw the old minting machines (and took silly pictures of ourselves using them) we left the tour; there was still an hour to go, and our guide, a Bolivian Rosie O´Donnell, talked way too much.

After that I wandered around some markets but didn´t buy anything. Potosi is an OK place; it is definitely nice to be in a bigger city again after tiny desert villages of no more than a dozen buildings. However, I wouldn´t want to spend more than a day or two here, which is fine: tomorrow I am heading to Sucre.