Bolivian Bingo

Back on track, nothing can stop us now. We left the Bolivian capital of La Paz, which was originally named La Pez by the Spanish who noticed the Indians were licking a small hard candy off of each others necks. We took the bus down, or up as the case may be, to a town called Oruro, a mining town. Oruro is another town that is, big surprise, very high up. We went to a mining museum that was interesting. Learned that mining is difficult and dangerous. Next we went to the city of Sucre, a beautiful town that has preserved a lot of the colonial architecture. Such a nice city is Sucre that in 1991 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was in this city that Bolivia declared independence in 1825. It was also here that the Bolivian congress created the Bolivian constitution, an amazing document that provided freedom to the people and an organized and fair way to vote and usher in a new age of equality. A document that so effectively distributed freedoms among the people of Bolivia that it was almost immediately ignored, trampled on and manipulated for the next 180 years or so. From 1825, the year Bolivia declared Independence (Yea) to today Bolivia has had 188 coups (boooo) with the longest reign of any single government being in power for ten years, and THAT was a dictatorship. In that time none of the 192 different governments have had very much time in power to really get anything done, that is, other than sell off parts of the country for their own personal gain. At the start of Bolivian Independence, Bolivia was roughly double the size it is today. The big winners of Bolivia's political turmoil :Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and anyone who was just wandering by Bolivia and decided to take a few thousand miles home as a souvenir. For some reason Bolivia´s long string of political luck seems to be changing. The current government seems to have the peoples best interest at heart and is moving to improve the standard of living of the average Bolivian. These are just some the interesting things we learned about in Sucre, the heart and soul of the most unstable, unlucky, is-it-Wednesday-it-must-be-time-for-a-military-junta themed, country in the world.
We don´t really have any photos of the history of this city, but wait... WE DO. Today Sucre is a university town with many students, students who happened to be protesting to get the government to move the seat of power from La Paz to Sucre. The students took to the street one night with torches.

It all seemed Innocent enough, until they got to the local government building where they started throwing the torches, and loud firecrackers at the building. I´m not sure about the message "Hey government come to Sucre so we uhhhhhh don´t have to travel as far to throw stuff at you" But, I´m sure it is more complicated than that.

I was fine with it as long as it was not "let´s protest against the blue eye, gringo, devil from Nebraska". Actually the mood of revolution was sweeping the crowd with such a powerful force that MY WIFE, Lotta got caught up in it. She grabbed a torch and started yelling "viva le revolution"

lucky for me there was a shoe store open and she lost interest in governmental overthrows in lieu of cheap shoes.
Here is an example of, oh I don´t know, EVERY TRUCK IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY. Take a deep breath.

The cars and trucks run a system here not unlike the U.S. where each car has a certain Horse Power. In Bolivia it is DHP, or Dead Horse Power, a power rating system where as in a car is put in a room with a bunch of horses. However many horses DIE from the exhaust, that is the rating of the car. This truck was rated 3 DHP, it gos up to 50.
But wait, there are dinosaurs in Sucre too. Well, just the foot prints but they are cool. A cement company was doing what cement companies do and they ran across some dino footprints. They carved out a mountain and there you go a bunch of dinos running, a 150 different species of dinosaur to be exact. How to get to the dino prints outside of town? why just take the truck with a dino head on it.

While the footprints were the main attraction they also created a dino park around it, with about 30 some life-size models of dinosaurs. We were a little leery of the dino park, but it was great, and not just by Bolivian standards but by any standards. The dinosaur models were very detailed and the layout was slick. Lotta made friends with a big meat eating dino and we plan to take him home.



After dino city it was time to move on, we jumped on the bus and headed off to Potosi. Potosi has a rich and sad history. The Spanish found very rich silver veins in the mountain there and started taking it out in 1544. So, much silver was extracted from Cerro Rico it is a wonder that it is still standing. In an unprecedented move, the Spanish, realizing the immense wealth in the mountain, created the town of Potosi in partnership with the Quechua people. While the work was dangerous and hard the Spanish rewarded the Quechua with proper schools, and an unheard of health care program that enabled the indigenous people to live a high standard of life that gave them a respect for the Spanish who lived in peace with the Quechua.........NOT. In reality, once the Spanish found the silver they enslaved every indigenous Quechua, and brought in African slaves, and faster than you can say "what human rights" they started a huge excavation. They required every slave over 18 to work in 12 hour shifts, but they did not leave the mine once their shift was over, they would stay down there for four months at a time. In the three hundred years the mine was owned by the Spanish, an estimated eight million slaves died in the mines. On the money side, Potosi became one of the richest cities in the world, wit more money than Paris or London. The Population grew to 200,000 making it one of the largest cities in the world. Then the silver started to run out and there was a crash. Today most mines are in the control of miner-owned cooperatives, but they still operate under conditions that have not changes much from the colonial times. Silver is still extracted but zinc, lead, and tin are the larger extracts now. Due to the history and amazing/depressing history Potosi has also been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A new thing the town is making money on are the tourists. A person can take a tour of a real life mine and see miners mining. Me and Lotta signed up. First we got suited up because mines are dirty and dark (just in case you did not know) then we went to the miners market to buy some gifts for the miners.

The miners do not make a lot of money so it is nice to give them something. We bought some soda, coca leaves, and dynamite to give away. The dynamite was cheap, only like 3 bucks. We bought a little extra because they would just blow it up for you later if you liked.

The coca leaves kill appetite, and give energy which is a good thing as the miners can not eat anything in the mines because of the dust and dangerous gasses.
Then we went to a processing area where they rocks that are taken out are broken down and processed.

Lotta was looking good in her outfit as was I, we had a group of eight people to go into the mine.

We walked into the small mine and about 200 yards in we came to an area with some devil dude (that is not the direct English translation)

We found that the miners believed that the devil lives in the mountain they are digging in and the best way to make friends with with devil is to give him things so the miners leave all sorts of things for him, I´m not sure how well this is working since the mortality rate is so high. And, "yes" the devil seems to be hung like a horse.

We would run through the mine quickly because every now and then a mine car would come zipping through and in certain areas there was no way to get out of the way, so as not to die you had to make sure you were not in one of these areas when the cart came though. We would get to an area where we could all sit down and gasp for breath through the dust. The thing with the mine tour is that it is a REAL mine, in NO WAY was it a tourist type thing, what this means is that it was pretty intense. Dust everywhere, and some of the highlighted gasses, please give a hand to: Silica Dust (the cause of silicosis), my buddy: arsenic gas, everyones favorite: acetylene vapors, and it would not be a mine without good old: asbestos deposits. The mine was amazingly dusty, we had to crawl over some mine carts full of rock and then we went further down to a place we had to crawl on our stomach, pulling ourselves forward with our hands. Travel is about self discovery, it is about finding how you will react in different situations, for example we found out that Lotta has a touch of claustrophobia, as I have a fear of flying, and dogs with pink sweaters. I personally do not blame her one bit, it was cramped and the dust and dark did not help. Lotta pulled back to the front of the cave with a guide the group went on. We got to see a real miner, he would work for four hours just to dig about 12 inches.

We then saw miners shovel rock into a basket to be pulled up out of the mine. Even though I assured the guide that I knew exactly how much shoveling rocks sucked, he insisted that I do a bit of shoveling.

After about three hours in the mine we left the mine. All in all two people had to leave early and one girl took off her hard had and instantly whacked her head on a low hanging pipe. It was very interesting and drove home the point that apart from the job of say..... landmine removal, sewer cleaner, or my last job, working in a mine is the worst job ever. I know that neither me or Lotta will forget the experience, very eye opening.

Next stop the largest salt flats on the face of the earth.