Silver Mines and Bombs

The silver mines in Potosi are not a nice place to be. A few years back I read "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell and he talks a lot about the conditions that miners endured back in the early 1900s. he also regularly refers to how things have got better as technology had developed. these mines in Potosi have missed the technological boat. there are around 5000 miners working as a cooperative, each earning about 50 bolivianos a day depending on how much work they get done (about twice the minimum wage and around £5). the life expectancy is around 15 years from entering the mine for work to death. the air is pretty horrid, and there is asbestos absoltuley everywhere, the work is back breaking, the tunnels are small and regularly collapse.

The mountain, Cerro Rico (which i think means rich mountain) used to be a great source of silver - and made Potosi the richest city in the world back during the Spanish times. Now there is very little silver, the mountain has been trimmed by about 400m in height due to the mining and all that can be extracted is trace elements (I couldn't quite pin down from our guide which they were but mainly zinc and tin i think).

on the way to the mine you have to buy presents for the miners, mainly ciggies (they love a good smoke down in those hot humid oxygen-less mines do them miners...), pop (orange pop is best), coca leaves and dynamite.

This is the stuff they're all after... Looks like a rock to me, but apparently there is useful stuff there.

The mine head at around 4400m.

The shady little entrance

This hardy chap laughed at me because I couldn't pick up one of the bags that they had extracted (just behind him). They weighed about 80kg!

This is a weird thing they have in there. It's a representation of their god of the underworld, names as Tio (uncle in English). He's the ying to Patchu Mama's yang (the god of the other world and equatable to mother nature). The miners gather round these statues that are dotted around the mine ever Friday and get pissed on pure alcohol (literally 96% alcohol, tastes mental...)

These are some of the miners, they all looked a little mental and a little bit hard. They smoked all the fags, took as many presents as they could get off us then carried on with their ridiculously back breaking work. The first lot below were pushing a 2 tonne trolley full of rock out of the mine (you had to dodge them when you heard them round the corner because there were no breaks on teh cart and they would literally crush you by accident if you got in the way of their momentum)

This bloke was batting a whole in the ground which he was to fill with dynamite and then blow up to loosen the rock.

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Anyway - seeing as we could buy dynamite we bought some extra (was with Israelis who unfortunately know far too much about explosives...).

This is the detonator...

This is the dynamite...

This is the bomb I made, I've forget the name of the white powder stuff we wrapped it in but it basically makes the explosion bigger (same effect as flour... I'm really kicking myself that I cant remember).

RUN!