Jonesin for a Ride!

Archive for the ‘2010-11-12 Bolivia/Chile’ Category

Tom and I meet up for breakfast at 8:00 because we only have a short window to visit the old Minting building where all the silver coins were minted from the mines. At 8:30 am the tour starts and we are greeted with an amazing building with the history that went along with it. We also visit a few churches before we head our of Potosi at 2:00 p.m.
We have a 118 mile dirt road ahead of us from Potosi to Uyuni. We find our way out of town and just outside of he town there is a toll booth for a road that is under construction. Some toll booths you need to park and walk up to the guard house, which is what I did. While I go in to pay the toll and show what little Spanish I know, Tom talks with a local hanging at the booth who is looking for a ride to Uyuni. We decide to have a local ride with us to Uyuni.
The road is newly paved here in the beginning. Our guest tells us that the first hour is paved, then the last two are not. We continue to climb up the newly paved road and make great progress. After about an hour, we hit some dirt, but it is just to go around a bridge that is under contraction. In a short time, we are back on newly paved asphalt.
This continues for most of the way, except some of the dirt becomes longer and longer stretches, but for the most part, it seems paved. We get towards the last 30 miles when we hit dirt again and climb up a long pass, when cresting the pass, we are told to spot by a patrol group. We tell them where we are heading and the let us pass. The local with us tells us they are looking for drugs.
We round the corner of the pass and from this view we can Uyuni, and it is about 5:45 p.m. with the sun low in the sky. We see a great vast flatness off in the distance – we will be heading towards the salt flats.
Tom has been making great time on this road and we are excited to see the town so very close in the distance. We are now on a long grade downward towards the town when a large rock jumps out in front of Tom and the car hits it dead center. We were travel about 45 mpg when this large rock appeared dead center and Tom thought we had enough clearance – boom boom, then car lurches and bumps up hard twice as we fly over it.
“That didn’t sound good!” The car is still running the same – no difference in sound. We don’t see any smoke coming out the back. Then the oil light comes on. Uhmmmmm after a short discussion Tom turns off the engine. “I’m gliding now – I’m use to this..”Tom quips.
We continue to glide for a few more miles toward town when the road levels out. Tom fires up the engine and we continue for about 45 seconds more and Tom says the engine just stop. We glide into town and are now on some stone street when we glide to a stop and pull off to the side.
We get out and look underneath. Neither Tom or I are mechanics, but by seeing the oil dripping underneath and seeing the bent up mess there, it looked like we ripped the oil pan off.
It is Sunday evening and the hitchhiker says this isn’t a good place to park the car – it will be stripped by morning. So we flag a cab, run down to our hotel, check in and drop off our stuff. The hotel we are staying at is the Tonito Hotel, run by Susan and Chris. They tell us who the best mechanic in this town of 15,000 is. So we grab the cab driver and tow it to his place for him to look at it in the morning.
So now we are in about as far away place from anywhere and we are stuck. This town doesn’t even have a tow truck and we are on a deadline to have to be back in La Paz on Wednesday night by the latest (flights are on Thursday).
The next day we arrange a private tour of the salt flats that starts at 10_30, but first check in with Claudio, the mechanic. He was already working on it when we got to his shop. He said he would have to pull the engine up to access the oil pan and see what the extent of the damage was, but he thought that if everything went smooth, he could have the car done by Tuesday night.
So we left for our 1 day tour out to the Salt Hotel and an island on the salt flat for a lunch.\This is the highest dry salt lake in the world at 12,000 feet. The salt is 7 meters thick and this place is Hugh!

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Potosi was quite the experience and adventure. We arrived late in the afternoon in town and checked into our hotel. Tom arranged for a 4 hour mine tour the next morning at 9 a.m.

This is a working class town of sorts, but with plenty of old structures to marvel at. Each of the towns have a main plaza in the center of town, with typically government buildings and a church. Since these towns were developed during the 1500’s, the streets are narrow for horse and buggy. The streets are also laid out in the typical grid fashion.

The town has a rich history, mostly because of the mountain and the minerals within it. Currently there are about 10,000 miners a day working the mines in Potosi. At one time, this was the largest and richest town in the world under the Spanish. When the Spanish ruled this area, this town was their funding source to fuel their empire. When the local population wasn’t enough, they imported slaves from Africa to work the mines. Miners would work shifts of 4 to 6 months at a time without signing daylight. The average life expectancy after entering the mines was 10 to 15 years. This area is a major significant to the world when you put it in perspective. This allowed the Spanish to continue otherworld influence an additional 200 years because of the wealth of this mine. Bolivia was the first to revolt for independence in this area, but the last to receive it, mainly because the Spanish always had plenty of forces to guard their funding source.

Today the mines are basically operated by cooperative’s. Our mine tour started with a quick stop where the miners pick up their coco leaves, a bar of some type of substance which activates the coco leaves, and the energy drink, which smells like grain alcohol. It is tradition to bring the miners gift, so we purchase a typical batch for them (coco leave, drink and alcohol). Today’s miners work 24 hour shifts, with the constant chewing of coco leaves to give them energy and it makes them not hungry – another words, these miners are buzzed up on some type of coco buzz for 24 hours. They don’t eat while in the mines these dust is bad for digestion.

Off to another part of town where we put on some overalls, boots and helmet and then headed up the hill. At the entrance they gave us miner lights for our helmets and we saw some miners push out some carts out of the mine. PUSH, I said. These mines are very primitive. We then followed our guide in. The mine we were entering was actually started in the 1600’s. For us tall guys, we were crouching quite a bit while walking, ducking our heads from the air pipes. With being at 12,000 feet, and crouching most of the time, Tom and I were getting quite the workout. The first part of the mine was wet as we sloshed through and walked in-between the railway. Then we branched left where is was dry and time to put our masks on because we were kicking up the dust.

Tom and I were constantly crouching and walking, at times half our height, which made it very difficult. We continued to walk some more, with pauses here and there. We walked about a mile when we stopped and had to squeeze by a cart and up over a small berm of gravel into an area where a miner was working.

We stayed for about 20 minutes talking and asking question with him. Then we headed toward another area. Our guide saw that I and Tom where having trouble and suggested we wait in an area while they traversed a more difficult tunnel. A couple of other people also stayed as the remaining went to visit another miner.

To tell you the truth, I was beginning to get a little Closter phobic with the air getting warmer and stale, and I had seen enough tunnels. I had already seen enough! I didn’t need to trudge through another tunnel. These are deplorable conditions for people to work in and I don’t ever want to buy a piece of silver. The thoughts that ran through my mind as we walked and crawled through this maze were of mixed emotions. Earlier in the week we saw some beautiful silver adorned religious artifacts at the churches we visited during the same era. The thought of the price of human suffering and cost just to adorn one of these church artifacts I found to be hypocritical.

We crawled through another small 6 meter area where we were finally on our way out. Just before exiting, we stopped by a worship icon that miners go to every Friday to give thanks and to go through a ceremony.

This trip exhausted me physical because of the high altitude and emotionally as see what conditions these miners work in. It is all manual labor. We asked why they do not use jack hammers. The answer was only if they find a vein worth a lot of money, otherwise, it is cheaper to use human labor on the cheaper veins of tin and other minerals.

Tomorrow we will visit the minting building in town before we take a road to Uyuni, to visit it the salt flats.

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We are in Potosi again tonight. We left the other day from Sucre and backtracked to Potosi so we could do a mine tour. What an experience is all I can say – I am exhausted, so I will fill in later if I have time.

But for now, here are Tom’s pictures so far from the trip – from picking up his bike, to Death Road, BMW dealer, Sucre and some Potosi.

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