Open Veins

Potosi :: Bolivia

It's dark, and hot as hell.

Places: Sucre & Potosi.

Coolest thing I did: Went on one of those tours that are only possible in the 3rd world. There's very few places at home you could handle dynamite with no formal training at all.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: La Paz isn't actually Bolivia's capital. They just moved the government there and no-one seemed to care. Perhaps we could do the same to Canberra.

My arrival to Sucre was marked by marching. The taxi driver was forced to take a pretty circular route to get into the middle of town mostly due to the fact the streets around the main square were clogged by children dressed up in military costumes marching about. I later found out from the Dutch woman who made me my lunch that marching is not optional, the day I arrived it was the primary school kids, the next day the high schoolers and the day after all people in public employment. Failure to march gets you docked 3 days pay. There's nothing like patriotism that run so deep it has to be enforced by diktat.

The old colonial heart of Sucre doesn't feel at all like Bolivia - the streets are laid out in a regular grid, the streets are lined with old colonial houses or white washed churches and the parks are well kept. If it wasn't all the kids dressed as adorable little revolutionaries causing gridlock for the whole time I was there I would even go as far to say that stuff seems to work in a very un-Bolivian way in Sucre. If I was a local and I wanted my kids to have a good future I'd get them to take an apprenticeship in white washing churches - there seems to be no end of work. The thing about Sucre is there really isn't that much to do in town (you can go out of town and look at a quarry full of dinosaur prints if that tickles your taco), you mostly just mooch about the place, drink passable coffee and watch the world go by. I spent most of my only afternoon there in a cafe that looks out over the city drinking a lot of coffee and contemplating the world.

So why is Sucre such a nice, un-Bolivian city? The answer lay 3 hours to the west, in a town called Potosi, which for a very long time could have been considered the beating heart of the Spanish Empire. On the bus in from Sucre you can't help but notice a massive multicoloured mountain dwarfing the city, Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) which was the cause of so much joy to it's Spanish discoverers and so much misery to just about everyone who came after them. For nearly 400 years people have been mining Cerro Rico for silver, and that silver funded Western Europe's rise to total dominance over the rest of the world. One of it's immediate effects was to make Sucre and Potosi fairly independent from the rest of Spanish Peru, and laid the foundation for Bolivia to steak it's claim as a separate country to Peru after independence, even if Lima had ruled all of Bolivia back when the Spaniards were in charge.

That wealth built all the stately buildings in Sucre, after all it's not by chance that all the alter pieces, bloody crucified Jesuses and serene Marys are all decked out in silver in some way. Potosi however, the source of all the wealth didn't seem to develop along the same well planned lines as Sucre, with the streets all jumbled together and the occasional oversized church erected to increase the prestige of one of the new rich fashioned from silver money. However, in truth most people remained poor, with nearly all of the silver being  stamped into coins, packed into trunks and making the voyage over the sea to the Spanish treasury (well those that didn't get waylaid by British and Dutch pirates).

There are very few estimates of how much silver from Potosi made it's way to Spain, but due to Spain being a fading empire much of that silver eventually went to fund the Industrial Revolution in England, setting the stage for the British to rule a full quarter of the Earth's surface. What is sure, however, was the Spanish were true to form in wanting to get that silver out of Latin America at the lowest cost possible. They press ganged the native into mining for them, and when they turned out to be a bit rebellious to go down mines that collapsed with dangerous regularly they imported African slaves to do the work. That also turned out to be a tough strategy to work out, seeing as most of the Africans were used to hot weather and living at sea level and Potosi is freezing cold and at 4000+m above sea level. Working under extreme altitude sickness tended to mean the slaves died at a fairly unprofitable rate, meaning the Spanish had to resort to tactics like holding whole villages hostage to get the natives to work down the mines. There was no attempt to build local industry, like happened in British North America, this was pure extraction.

Just to show how rich the veins of silver in Potosi were, there are still large co-operatives of miners tunnelling there way into what has to be an anthill of tunnels trying to extract what's left. To go and visit one of these co-operative mines is really the only reason you'd find yourself in Potosi as a tourist. They deck you out in gum boots, waterproofs and a helmet with a head torch and then it's off to the miners' market to buy gifts for the miners you are going to encounter on the way down into the hill. What do you get the miner that has everything? Apparently coca leaves (as they don't eat during an 8 hour shift), juice and water (because it's up to 50 degrees down there), 96% ethanol (which they drink) and dynamite (wait, what?). Apparently anyone who wants it can go to the market and buy sticks of dynamite, complete with blasting caps. That probably explains some of the louder bangs I was hearing during the street protests in La Paz.

Metaphors about the mines being like Hell continue to this day, but going through the entry into the mines, all stained red with iron oxide you can see how highly superstitious people managed to consider themselves on their way into the underworld to steal all Satan's wealth. They call him Tio, and at the entry to the mine you find a cow's skull where you can make an offering to Tio, so he won't collapse the mine on you and let you take his silver. He seems to like coca leaves. It reminded me of the sacrifices to Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of narcotrafficantes in Mexico. I guess you make your own traditions sometimes.

The mining tours, it must be said, are only something that could exist somewhere like Bolivia. It's totally unsafe, with you having to press up against the wall when 2 ton rail carts come screaming around the corner with no breaks, you have to climb down steep shafts on your hands and knees, you have just a bandanna tied around your mouth to stop you from breathing in too much of the dust that kills miners of silicosis after about a 20 year working life and there are people working with jackhammers and dynamite somewhere around you, you're not just sure where. It would probably make the brain of the average OH&S officer in Australia split in half in a bloody mess.

You just can't really explain how hard the lives these guys live is down there. Breaking rocks with sledge hammers and carting out the debris in the hope that after processing it will contain minerals worth selling. The grade of silver left in Cerro Rico isn't really good enough for jewellery they told me, and most of it goes off to East Asia to be turned into bits of mobile phone. It's processed with such nice stuff as arsenic and cyanide (they stopped with mercury a little while ago now...) so working above ground in the processing plants probably won't do much more for your life expectancy than working underground. I'm not exactly sure I understood how these so-called co-operatives distribute the wealth they find, but it seems like some miners get paid better than the man driving a taxi or working in a kitchen and some don't. The conditions are not the kind of thing you'd find in the west - Australia's miners now seem to operate solely by chopping entire mountains down to get at the stuff inside, which is much safer for the workers, who are also famously well paid. They tell me they yield about 4 usable tonnes of stuff (not all of it silver) from the 90 tonnes of rock they pull out of the mountain every day, which probably explains why no big global mining company has had any reason to chop Cerro Rico down once and for all for what little goodies remain at it's core.

One thing that stands out here is El Presidente Evo Morales isn't exactly a popular figure, either with the conservatives of Sucre or the miners of Potosi. The former tended to do very well out of the old regimes that entrenched the gains of the small middle and upper classes while keeping the poor down, and the latter are quite pissed off that this man that looks just like them, who came to the mines and promised them the conditions would improve long before he was elected to high office. If you add the road blocks, the protests and so on you do wonder how long this guy can manage to stay in charge. What does strike me however, that unlike Cuba or the pre-revolutionary Middle East is that the Bolivians will proclaim quite loudly in the street they don't like him - that lack of fear does make you think that there is a chance he could be replaced by boring, democratic means.

So today is a bit quiet about town because it's one of the 3 days a year that the miners take their families up to the mines to see whole llamas sacrificed (apparently llama foetuses are more regular sacrifices, but a whole llama is a bit deal) in order to bring new riches to them and their families. I'm really tight on time now so I'm hopping a bus at midday to Uyuni, my last real stop in Bolivia before going across the salt flats and desert to get back into Chile, to the town of San Pedro de Atacama. I've booked a flight back to Santiago next Friday (6 days time!) and then the trip is basically over. I've been promised that these salt flats are something else, so hopefully I've saved the best until last.

Cause and Effect

Sucre :: Bolivia

Man, do I now hate sand flies.

Places: Rurrenabaque, Madidi National Park, La Paz & Sucre.

Coolest thing I did: Went fishing for piranhas with chunks of steak. Only Ricardo the Guide caught one though.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Bolivians seem to love putting a statue of a military figure in every free town square, round about or supermarket forecourt. Which is strange seeing as they don't seem to have ever won a war. Ever.

I would like to start by sending out a big thanks to everyone who responded to the recent bloody pictures of my face with "when are you going to shave and get a haircut?". I now wonder if I lose a limb I'm going to get "man you look pale. Get some sun!". It's becoming apparent that the locals agree with you. I think my favourite "get a haircut" reference of the week was being called Karl Marx after a bar fight (due to the fact the only thing left from my bike crash is a persistent black eye). I'd shave, but it gives the police manning the road blocks a big laugh to see my passport photo from 10 years ago vs. me now. I couldn't take that away from them.

After a relaxing night in the town of Rurrenabaque I got on a South East Asian style long tail boat and was taken 5 hours up river to the ultra posh Chalalan Lodge, an "eco" resort owned by the local people who happened to be living in the Madidi National Park when it was declared a national park and wisely decided to go for the high end tourist to cash in on their luck. They've built a pipeline of new guides, giving them training on English, how to behave around rich white people, what to show rich white people in the jungle and stuff like that. Our guide Richard (because apparently Americans have trouble with saying "Ricardo", which sounds like bollocks to me) has been doing it for about a decade and seemed to have a very good knack for pointing out stuff around us as we walked and boated about the place, even if he did have a pretty lazy pace of speech and was not a many of many words. The Canadians I was with chose to take offence to this, but I kind of liked his lack of enthusiasm - it was mildly refreshing.

The eco lodge itself has running water, showers where you can use soap and all the mod-cons, so I'm not sure what exactly makes it "eco", but it was a very nice place to chill out in a hammock, eat decent food (except for the beef that was inexplicably the only thing the chef charred to rubber every time) and go swimming in the lake which also houses quite a few caimans (caimen?). You have to wash your insect repellent off before taking a swim because apparently DEET is somehow poisonous to basically everything it touches, which means if you sit on the dock like me taking in the view for about half an hour you're going to get bitten to hell by sand flies and end up with hundreds of little bite marks all over you. Gay as. I only took a couple of swims, and was told that if I wanted to actually see the caimans I had to swim either very late at dusk or at night, but to be honest I just didn't want to get bitten any more. Instead I spent most evenings reading The Girl Who Played With Fire. It took me like 3 days. I'm not sure who Stieg Larsson was in life, but those books are like crack. For those who can get over the bits where his Swedish obsession with violent sex comes out a little bit too graphically.

So you spend your days either in boats or walking through the jungle, both during the day and at night to try and learn a bit about the ecosystem around you. From Ricardo's explanations it seems to me that everything has the basic purpose in life of being food for something else, a massive chain of cause and effect. The girls would say "ah, that's pretty" to a butterfly and Ricardo would go "frogs eat those" or some such. Realist, that man.

So the highlights for me were the tiny little coloured frogs that were all deadly poison, the metre long snake that crossed our path by accident, the two separate stampedes of wild pigs that we could hear coming just in the nick of time to get out of the trail and watch them blur past (the biggest was well over 100 pigs) and nearly tripping over a 1.5m black caiman in the dark. Oh, and of course the monkeys. There's several species of small faced monkeys living in the Madidi NP and since the locals stopped eating them for bush meat they tend to be fairly un-bothered by people at all. Probably the highlight was a whole bunch of little yellow and little brown monkeys (the second ones called cappuccinos, I guess for their brown fur and white faces) coming right down into the lodge and eating all the mandarins from the tree outside the kitchen. They also tried the grapefruits but apparently find them a bit acidic so mostly throw them on the ground. Which meant you had to be careful where you stood and took your pictures just in case you got hit with a falling citrus of some kind.

We spent one morning in a leaky boat (I had to bail while Ricardo rowed) fishing for piranhas with chunks of steak, on loose hand lines with no sinkers. This meant you basically could feel the fish nibbling on the meat (because they have small mouths) but you had to be very good at timing when to yank on your line to hook one, and I mostly came up with a bare hook. Apparently a whole school of them can finish off a calf so fast it looks like the water around it is boiling, but on their own a single piranha isn't that scary looking. Of course, I didn't go swimming in that particular lake. Ricardo managed to hook us a fish so we could have our picture taken with it's sharp teeth sticking out, which was kind of cool but would have been better if it was one I'd caught myself.

I think my man crush on Ricardo really came into it's own on Sunday night, which was when the staff treat the guests to some of their local music and dancing. No-one dresses up, you drink some concoction of milk, cinnamon and rum and the dancing is just silly. You know when kids dance by just doing bits of every move they know? Well it was just like that. The music was drums and pan pipes which alternated between passable and terrible depending on the seemingly endless song and it seemed mostly so the trainee guides could try and seduce the single gringas. Richard basically spent the night sitting on a bar stool getting smashed on beers. When I was dancing with the girl who cooked our food and she looked like she'd rather be anywhere else I kind of thought I'd rather be sitting on a bar stool getting smashed on beers too.

Apparently my description of the evening was racist, but I'm not sure how. I described it as that bit at the end of Return of the Jedi when the ewoks are all playing music and dancing to celebrate the Death Star being destroyed. Because that's what it looked like.

So the Lodge itself is a model for getting the locals to have a steak in keeping the National Park in good condition, as everyone is an owner, guide or supplier to the Lodge in the village and keeping it pristine is their livelihood. There are other lodges and tours, but all are based outside the Park and have to boat in every day, whereas we were able to finish dinner, grab our flashlights and go looking for tarantulas to take photos of. That was kind of cool. You also get woken up on clear days by howler monkeys re-establishing their territory vocally, but we only heard that one day because it's the tail end of the wet season on the jungle side of the Andes and it rained most mornings.

The best alternative trip I heard about is run by a totally unlicensed Israeli army veteran (aren't they all?) who takes people out to the jungle to hunt all their own food, build their own rafts for transport and their own huts to live in. That would explain the massive amounts of Israeli's I was seeing around town in Rurre, probably the first big concentration I've seen in all of Bolivia. The Bolivians are slightly miffed about the whole thing, but I guess you don't mess with a bloke who regularly kills caimen for food with a bunch of tourists helping out.

My trip out to the jungle was always going to be a little borderline, time-wise mostly because this is Bolivia. I'd been told the last night bus for Sucre in the south leaves La Paz at 8pm so it was awesome to get to the airport in Rurre and find that there was no plane waiting for us. Luckily we were only two hours delayed (not two days) getting onto that 18 seat Fairchild turbo prop and had a fairly quick 30 min flight back to La Paz. It was crazy to have the plane climb pretty much straight up from the jungle (120m above sea level) and basically just make it high enough to get over the ridgeline of the mountains before dropping only like 5 mins to land in La Paz (somewhere in the order of 3,800m above sea level). Lucky for me I did manage to still have time to hop a night bus and this morning I arrived in the old (well technically current) capital of Bolivia, Sucre.