Potosi, city of tarnished silver [42/50]

It was an easy 200 Km ride from Sucre (the capital of Bolivia) to Potosi along a lively, brisk paved road. Although there are 42,000 Kms of roads in Bolivia, only 2000 kms of them are paved. Plus petrol stations are few and far between and when you finally find one, there is no guarantee that they will sell gasoline to a gringo anyhow. So I am injecting myself into the main arteries of Bolivia and will hop into a 4WD jeep to travel further afield.

I crossed a milestone in reaching Potosi in that I have now ridden 12000 Kms from the Caribbean Coast of Colombia to Potosi in Southern Bolivia (and geographically emaciated Chile is next). And although this has been challenging as a solo traveler, one is never alone in the grand landscapes of Bolivia when one has Kafka, Tolstoy, Garcia-Marquez and Kapachinski as accompanying grand narratives. I often see Andeans, sitting alone on the side of the road, miles from anywhere, or walking solo in the desert, a small dot on a vast landscape. I wonder what grand narratives are carrying them?

Potosi has a history too brutal and too core to human experience to do it justice here. The town sits at a respectable four thousand metres, overlooked by a five-hundred-year-old silver mine that is witness to some of the most extreme forms of exploration imaginable. In colonial times, Andean and African slaves worked the mine, bankrolling the Spanish empire, making Potosi one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the world for its time. There is no more silver left in the mine, only silver-zinc that is worked by miner-owned collectives, in conditions that are still far from perfect.

I visited the mine for an uncomfortable, voyeuristic two hours, stooping through four-foot-tall mine shafts, hitting my head every few minutes, walking through mud and water in the dim, lantern-lit light while breathing Beijing air. I encountered some miners and gave one a bag of coca leaves that apparently is medicinal for altitude sickness as the shaft penetrated the mountain at an absurdly high four thousand four hundred metres. The miners work with picks, shovels and dynamite and labouriously fill trolleys that hold one tonne of silver-zinc which in the present climate, only fetches about one hundred Bolivianos (about fifteen USD).

A unique aspect of the mine is that it is a refuge from Catholicism, meaning when one enters the tunnel they enter the world of a devil-thing and leave Catholicism at the pit entrance. Accordingly, there is a menacing looking devil statue in the mine with an extraordinarily large penis that has an insatiable appetite for coca leaves, ninety percent proof alcohol and cigarettes. The miners worship this instead.

I left the mine feeling shallow, wanting to explore it’s dark history some more and feeling that the next time I meet a complaining Australian, etc. with no real perspective on the world that I will be a little less generous in my opinion of them (down the hole buddy).