Potosi

Potosi- highest city in the world at 4,067m. Once we got to our hostel in Potosi, located right by the main square, we headed out for something to eat and found one of the only places open was a Mexican place called 'Coyote'. The woman who worked there had a really tiny puppy that was only one month old. I asked to hold it- it was so cute and just wanted to play and bite everything. It made Jenny jump at first because it was walking around in the restaurant on its own and she felt something rub against her leg. It gave everyone there a good laugh!

In the morning we took the 8:30am Potosi mines tour, along with loads of people from our hostel. The guides got us dressed up in protective over trousers and coat, wellies, a helmet, torch and some trendy bags to put our cameras and water in. We drove a short way to the miner's market, which was a street selling all sorts of different things, like dynamite, ammonium nitrate and wire with gunpowder in. Basically everything to make an explosion in the mines. There was also a load of alcohol- 96%. So pure ethanol, which the miners drank. We realised that this is what we'd swigged on death road. We were encouraged to buy 'gifts' for the miners, so we bought an orange juice drink, alcohol (a decent amount priced at the equivalent of 80p) and gloves. We then drove to the entrance of the mine and waited to go in. On a normal day 12,000 miners work inside, all male, working up to 24 hours in one go. They manage to go all this time by chewing coca leaves, which surpress their hunger. We went inside. I found it very unsafe. The rocks were crumbling as you touched them and it was a bit of an obstacle course, climbing through small holes, scrambling onto pieces of unstable wood and climbing down ladders to another level. There was arsenic in the rocks too, which formed a red colour. The mine isn't government run and so the conditions they work in are terrible. The only thing helping them is the compresed air in pipes. It was interesting to see but not enjoyable one bit. I couldn't believe people worked like this still. A man was working in there with a chisel, seperating the silver and tin. We were told he'd worked there for fifteen years. A few people stayed to watch the lighting and the hear a dynamite explosion. I really didn't want to as it wasn't the most fun experience of my life and I didn't fancy risking rocks falling on me after an unsafe explosion, so I headed out with Jenny and a couple of other women. I was pretty relieved to see daylight to be honest- there's light at the end of the tunnel, literally!

That afternoon we received confirmation from our buses, had some lunch, picked our laundry up, made our way to the bus station. Waiting in the bus station was quite funny- women shouting 'siete media a la Uyuni' or 'ocho a la Uyuni'. I think they even found it funny, competing against each other and sounding like a broken record. We then caught a four hour bus to Uyuni which got in at about half ten. We arrived on a deserted random street, with no one around, especially no taxis. We didn't know what to do. We went in some doors to a hostel (the only place open) and asked where our hostel was. He said it was a couple of blocks away on the main square. We risked it, and hurried quickly to our hostel, using the small map with directions that he'd given us. We were pretty scared but five minutes later we were there. We went to bed and eventually got to sleep, despite the guy snoring in our room!