We´d had enough of La Paz. We navigated ourselves to the city terminal, where we got completely lucky and bought our tickets for half price from a woman who´d accidentally bought tickets to the wrong city, and couldn´t get a refund (doesn´t make sense, exactly, but then - what does in Bolivia?). When they took role on the surprisingly cushy bus (our Rurre standards were apparently lower than the rest of the country´s transit), Scott and I responded to Noemi and Margarita, respectively. The bus took us overnight to the mining town of Potosi, renouned for its world production of silver, and the opportunity for tourists to interact with live dynamite.
Potosi
We caught a cab from the Potosi bus terminal to the center of town for 10 bolivanos, and we took the second cab to quote us that price just to be sure it was a fair one. When we arrived in the center, however, the taxi driver looked pained when I handed him a 10 Bs. bill, and explained, as though to a child, that it was 10 bolivianos cada uno (each), and that I therefore still owed him 10. With practiced patience, I tried to explain to him that we knew it should only be 10 Bs. total since we´d talked with another taxi driver. He then tried to say that his pointing out a few important buildings on the 5 minute ride was worth us paying extra, but I knew I was right when, after only a moment or two, he got back in his cab with feigned exasperation. Score one for the gringa.
We were hungry. But, it being only 5:45am, we still had some time before anything (food, tours, etc) would open. We saw another backpack-clad tourist wandering dolefully around the main plaza, and joined forces (he turned out to be from Denver). Our game plan for the day was simple: we wanted to find a tour to take us exploring in the mines in the morning, then catch an evening bus to Uyuni, from where we would accomplish the last Bolivian task on our checklist - visiting the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flats). At around 7:45am, the first tour agency opened, and we entered the doors of The Real Deal at the kind urging of one of the Bolivian proprietors. As it turned out, the company was only about a year old, and was working on establishing itself. Unlike the several other companies that offered mine tours, however, The Real Deal was opened by six former miners who were sick of tourism exploiting their lifestyle. The tour, therefore, was a bit more expensive than other operators, but we liked the idea of supporting a collective-style operation, and plus they offered us access to some of the less-explored mines (there are 10,000 miners in the mines throughout the city´s one mountain everyday).
Though we initially found his aggressive Spanglish and pitchy, drawn-out declaration of ¨my friiiiiiiiends¨ to be a bit abrasive, our guide, Ephraim, ended up making the tour truly unforgettable. Once we´d been outfitted in our mining outfits (the man tying my belt confirmed my fitness to enter the mines by poking me in the stomach and demanding, ¨no babies?¨), Ephraim reiterated the fact that he himself had been a miner by introducing us to several of his friends at the Miner´s Market. This, of course, was not unlike a regular market, except that its most valuable commodities were fruit juice, coca leaves (which the miners, who ate nothing during their 10-hour work days in order to keep the call of Mother Nature at bay, chewed ceaselessly), liter bottles of 96% alcohol (the miners asked the Pachamama - Mother Earth - for pure ore, therefore they must drink pure alcohol), and dynamite. At Ephra´s urging, we all purchased several gifts for the miners, which we then distributed throughout our tour to the grateful miners.
We then visited a refinery, where the raw material was crushed, then underwent chemical refinement, before it could be shipped off for industrial purposes. The majority of the ore extracted these days from the mountain is a mixture of zinc, copper, and silver, and the three are kept together for export. In addition, the mine functions as groups of independent operators; father-son-cousin teams work their own hours and reap their own profits from distinct regions of the mines.
Then it was time to enter the mines. Equipped with rather flimsy pants and jackets, to repel the dust in the mines; bandanas to keep the dust from our lungs; hard hats; head lamps; and normal rubber rainboots, we - with minimal fanfare - entered the mines. Though the passages varied in size, shape, and quantity of wastewater pooling in the recesses around our feet, most of the time we were bent at the waist, scrabbling along in the darkness, eyes trained upon the rear of the person in front of you. In certain passages, the dust stirred up by the mining operations burned your lungs and eyes, and it was hard not to imagine the microscopic particles moving deeply into the alveoli of your lungs, where they would cause permanent damage. We followed a main tunnel with a five-foot ceiling, passing adjoining tunnels on the left and right, which wound mysteriously upward, sideways, or down into blackness. Open mine shafts abounded, some with the unmistakeable sounds of men at work wafting up from who knows what depts. The miners we met along the way were cheerful, industrious, and seemed not at all bothered by this lone tour group, penetrating the deepest crevices of their lifeblood.
At one point, Ephra stopped and indicated a rock fall to our right. ¨My friiiiiiends,¨ he crooned, ¨we climb through there, one by one.¨ Our gazes followed his outstretched hand to the top of the rock slide, where an impossibly tiny nook revealed itself as more than just a recess. Scrambling up the debris pile, we took turns crawling, on our hands and knees, through about 15 feet of subterranean hell, before emerging in a much larger chamber on the far side. Panting, forgetting the dust and inhaling the stale air with gusto, we didn´t realize that the true surprise was yet to come...
Ephra led us a few hundred feet down the cavernous passage, then stopped and turned. We all stopped as well, and caught our breath. There, sitting with sinister poise on a rock ledge, and glaring fixedly into our souls with devil eyes, sat a horrifying figure made of wood and adorned with cigarettes, bottlecaps, and confetti.
¨El Tio,¨ Ephra breathed.
The Uncle.
We arranged ourselves near this mystifying deity, and Ephra explained to us that the miners worshipped both the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, and the Tio, who he likened to a benevolent devil (?). Tio rules the underworld, or the world of the miners, and to ensure purity of ore and safety from accidents, the miners often surround this statue, shower it with cigarettes, 96% alcohol, and - once a year - the blood and heart of a llama, which they sacrifice in Tio´s honor. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I realized how deep underground we were and how insufficient my sense of direction would be to lead me out.
I asked everyone to put out their headlamps and hold still, and we all endured the most complete blackness possible on this planet.
When we finally exited the mines, after a good number of Moria references and a harrowing climb up a 60-foot vertical later between mine levels, we´d given away most of our presents and knew the tour was drawing to a close. However, we´d been adamant on one more aspect of the tour, which Ephra begrudgingly gave us. A dynamite show.
With the deft skill and affinity for nitroglycerin that earned him the nickname ¨Master of Disaster,¨ Ephra unpacked several sticks of dynamite and reassembled them in a plastic bag with one long fuse. He´d warned me there were only two minutes between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation, during which time he passed the bomb around to the more daring of the tour group for our photo-snapping pleasure. Then, with only something like 40 seconds to spare (I´d set my stopwatch), he dashed away with the explosive. He ran maybe 200 meters, then dropped to his knees and began packing the bomb into the dry earth. He seemed to be doing it with extreme care and attention, but with only 10 seconds left until detonation, I yelled to him to run. He did not hurry until he was satisfied with the job he´d done, and - thank goodness - it turned out the fuse was two and half minutes long.
The dynamite blast was formidable, to say the least, and knocked the breath out of more than one of us! It was hard to imagine these kinds of blasts happening within the mine, and easy to imagine the results of any miscalculations.
Back in town, we had lunch of llama burgers (quite gamey), then Scott and I grabbed a bus to Uyuni, and to our last night in Bolivia.
Uyuni Tour
We arrived in Uyuni around midnight, quickly grabbed a hostel, and woke early to find a tour operator that would take us to the salt flats that very day. As is the case with all of Bolivia´s attractions, the Salar de Uyuni can only be reached by tour. Of course, this necessarily means there are hundreds of tour companies, all offering the exact same product at slightly varying prices. Having slowly learned this, we picked one of the first companies with whom we spoke (they assured us they took precautions to protect the wildlife and natural fragility of the ecosystems involved - who really knows), grabbed some breakfast, and set out. Like I said, the three-day, two night tour follows a well-established formula, which consisted of the following:
Day 1.
1) Visit to the Train Graveyard. Cool if you like trains, also cool if you don´t, the Train Graveyard is - surprise - the end of an old train line, and features slowly rusting locomotives. Our new, baffled French friend got exposed to the hilarious phenomenon of a giant group of schoolchildren asking if they can each take individual pictures with Scott and me, because of our strange yellow locks (blondes really DO have more fun).
2) Colchani: last stop to buy cheap Bolivian crafts and goods. I bought an alpaca sweater. Someone else bought socks.
3) Salt mountain viewing. The area where salt is piled into pyramids and left to dry by natural forces; this is one step in the refining process of mining salt.
4) Visit to the salt hotel. The salt hotel is a structure made entirely of salt in the middle of the enormous salt flat. It´s unclear why you stop there, except to take cool pictures where you use the distorted perspective of the salt flats to make tiny versions of people appear to be standing on other people´s heads/palms/tongues.
5) Lunch, then hike to the peak of the Fish Island, or Incawasi. Upon climbing to the top of this small ¨island,¨ we could see the salt flat extend for miles (the salar is 12,000 sq meters)!
6) Drive to salt hostel, dinner, sleep.
Day 2.
1) Visit to first altiplano lake. ...with FLAMINGOES!
2) Visit to second altiplano lake, lunch.
3) Volcano vista. We were allowed to walk around for approximately 22 minutes in a sloping canyonlands, from which we could see a huge volcano in the relative distance.
4) Visit Rock Tree. An amazing natural rock structure that roughly resembles a tree, yet most people used it as an opportunity to fight gravity and the roaring winds and climb the other assorted rock formations, under some of which we found snow (it´s that cold in the altiplano desert)!
5) Visit Laguna Colorada. Red lake. No other way to describe it, but this huge and incredibly shallow lake has enormous mounds of white borax rising throughout, is dotted with flamingoes, and, because of chemical reactions that occur in certain microorganisms in response to the heavy winds, is bright red.
6) Hostel, dinner, sleep.
Day 3.
1) Geyser viewing. We awoke at 4am to make it to the geysers for sunrise, and viewing of the extreme geothermal activity of the region. One tourist warned us that some Americans a year before had gotten too close to one of the innocuous-enough-looking mudpots, fallen in, and were burned to death.
2) Swimming in the hot springs. In the cold glare of about 7am, we joined maybe 50 other tourists in a large hotsprings pool, which was not only the closest thing we´d had to a shower in a few days, but also helped fight the morning chill. Our particular group spent so long at the springs that we didn´t have time to stop at Laguna Verde, which was just as well, considering the lack of winds meant it wasn´t green today.
3) Visit to Laguna Verde. See above.
4) Border crossing OR seven-hour return drive to Uyuni. Along with the Frenchman, we left our jeep and new friends, received our Bolivian exit stamps, and climbed into a bus for the hour-long ride to the Chilean border checkpoint.
Overall, the whole thing seemed rather poorly planned, as the vast majority of the tour consisted of riding in the back of a bumpy jeep with strangers, occasionally leapfrogging other groups on the exact same itinerary. Our group, however, which was led by a hands-off, quiet guide who only told us the bare minimum about each location, consisted of a family of Argentinians and a Frenchman. Our common language being Spanish, we got lots of good practice, and I got to dust off my long-unused French, and slowly cleanse it of the strange Spanish accent it now bore.
Potosi
 |
| Some miners we met |
We were hungry. But, it being only 5:45am, we still had some time before anything (food, tours, etc) would open. We saw another backpack-clad tourist wandering dolefully around the main plaza, and joined forces (he turned out to be from Denver). Our game plan for the day was simple: we wanted to find a tour to take us exploring in the mines in the morning, then catch an evening bus to Uyuni, from where we would accomplish the last Bolivian task on our checklist - visiting the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flats). At around 7:45am, the first tour agency opened, and we entered the doors of The Real Deal at the kind urging of one of the Bolivian proprietors. As it turned out, the company was only about a year old, and was working on establishing itself. Unlike the several other companies that offered mine tours, however, The Real Deal was opened by six former miners who were sick of tourism exploiting their lifestyle. The tour, therefore, was a bit more expensive than other operators, but we liked the idea of supporting a collective-style operation, and plus they offered us access to some of the less-explored mines (there are 10,000 miners in the mines throughout the city´s one mountain everyday).
 |
| Miners in the dark tunnels |
We then visited a refinery, where the raw material was crushed, then underwent chemical refinement, before it could be shipped off for industrial purposes. The majority of the ore extracted these days from the mountain is a mixture of zinc, copper, and silver, and the three are kept together for export. In addition, the mine functions as groups of independent operators; father-son-cousin teams work their own hours and reap their own profits from distinct regions of the mines.
 |
| 60 vertical feet of wormhole ladders |
At one point, Ephra stopped and indicated a rock fall to our right. ¨My friiiiiiends,¨ he crooned, ¨we climb through there, one by one.¨ Our gazes followed his outstretched hand to the top of the rock slide, where an impossibly tiny nook revealed itself as more than just a recess. Scrambling up the debris pile, we took turns crawling, on our hands and knees, through about 15 feet of subterranean hell, before emerging in a much larger chamber on the far side. Panting, forgetting the dust and inhaling the stale air with gusto, we didn´t realize that the true surprise was yet to come...
Ephra led us a few hundred feet down the cavernous passage, then stopped and turned. We all stopped as well, and caught our breath. There, sitting with sinister poise on a rock ledge, and glaring fixedly into our souls with devil eyes, sat a horrifying figure made of wood and adorned with cigarettes, bottlecaps, and confetti.
 |
| Tio |
The Uncle.
We arranged ourselves near this mystifying deity, and Ephra explained to us that the miners worshipped both the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, and the Tio, who he likened to a benevolent devil (?). Tio rules the underworld, or the world of the miners, and to ensure purity of ore and safety from accidents, the miners often surround this statue, shower it with cigarettes, 96% alcohol, and - once a year - the blood and heart of a llama, which they sacrifice in Tio´s honor. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I realized how deep underground we were and how insufficient my sense of direction would be to lead me out.
I asked everyone to put out their headlamps and hold still, and we all endured the most complete blackness possible on this planet.
When we finally exited the mines, after a good number of Moria references and a harrowing climb up a 60-foot vertical later between mine levels, we´d given away most of our presents and knew the tour was drawing to a close. However, we´d been adamant on one more aspect of the tour, which Ephra begrudgingly gave us. A dynamite show.
With the deft skill and affinity for nitroglycerin that earned him the nickname ¨Master of Disaster,¨ Ephra unpacked several sticks of dynamite and reassembled them in a plastic bag with one long fuse. He´d warned me there were only two minutes between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation, during which time he passed the bomb around to the more daring of the tour group for our photo-snapping pleasure. Then, with only something like 40 seconds to spare (I´d set my stopwatch), he dashed away with the explosive. He ran maybe 200 meters, then dropped to his knees and began packing the bomb into the dry earth. He seemed to be doing it with extreme care and attention, but with only 10 seconds left until detonation, I yelled to him to run. He did not hurry until he was satisfied with the job he´d done, and - thank goodness - it turned out the fuse was two and half minutes long.
The dynamite blast was formidable, to say the least, and knocked the breath out of more than one of us! It was hard to imagine these kinds of blasts happening within the mine, and easy to imagine the results of any miscalculations.
 |
| Not as cool as an elephant graveyard, but still... |
Uyuni Tour
We arrived in Uyuni around midnight, quickly grabbed a hostel, and woke early to find a tour operator that would take us to the salt flats that very day. As is the case with all of Bolivia´s attractions, the Salar de Uyuni can only be reached by tour. Of course, this necessarily means there are hundreds of tour companies, all offering the exact same product at slightly varying prices. Having slowly learned this, we picked one of the first companies with whom we spoke (they assured us they took precautions to protect the wildlife and natural fragility of the ecosystems involved - who really knows), grabbed some breakfast, and set out. Like I said, the three-day, two night tour follows a well-established formula, which consisted of the following:
 |
| Our room - floor, walls, beds made of salt |
1) Visit to the Train Graveyard. Cool if you like trains, also cool if you don´t, the Train Graveyard is - surprise - the end of an old train line, and features slowly rusting locomotives. Our new, baffled French friend got exposed to the hilarious phenomenon of a giant group of schoolchildren asking if they can each take individual pictures with Scott and me, because of our strange yellow locks (blondes really DO have more fun).
2) Colchani: last stop to buy cheap Bolivian crafts and goods. I bought an alpaca sweater. Someone else bought socks.
3) Salt mountain viewing. The area where salt is piled into pyramids and left to dry by natural forces; this is one step in the refining process of mining salt.
4) Visit to the salt hotel. The salt hotel is a structure made entirely of salt in the middle of the enormous salt flat. It´s unclear why you stop there, except to take cool pictures where you use the distorted perspective of the salt flats to make tiny versions of people appear to be standing on other people´s heads/palms/tongues.
5) Lunch, then hike to the peak of the Fish Island, or Incawasi. Upon climbing to the top of this small ¨island,¨ we could see the salt flat extend for miles (the salar is 12,000 sq meters)!
 |
| View of the infinite salar |
Day 2.
1) Visit to first altiplano lake. ...with FLAMINGOES!
2) Visit to second altiplano lake, lunch.
3) Volcano vista. We were allowed to walk around for approximately 22 minutes in a sloping canyonlands, from which we could see a huge volcano in the relative distance.
4) Visit Rock Tree. An amazing natural rock structure that roughly resembles a tree, yet most people used it as an opportunity to fight gravity and the roaring winds and climb the other assorted rock formations, under some of which we found snow (it´s that cold in the altiplano desert)!
 |
| Altiplano lake #1 - Scott in the distance |
6) Hostel, dinner, sleep.
Day 3.
 |
| Laguna Colorada |
2) Swimming in the hot springs. In the cold glare of about 7am, we joined maybe 50 other tourists in a large hotsprings pool, which was not only the closest thing we´d had to a shower in a few days, but also helped fight the morning chill. Our particular group spent so long at the springs that we didn´t have time to stop at Laguna Verde, which was just as well, considering the lack of winds meant it wasn´t green today.
3) Visit to Laguna Verde. See above.
4) Border crossing OR seven-hour return drive to Uyuni. Along with the Frenchman, we left our jeep and new friends, received our Bolivian exit stamps, and climbed into a bus for the hour-long ride to the Chilean border checkpoint.
 |
| Geothermal ¨activity¨ |
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