Getting High = Deja Vu

Things about the Bolivian Antiplano seem oddly reminiscent to earlier chapters in my adventures. The beautiful white city of Sucre looks just like the beautiful white city of Arequipa. The white faces of all the Presidents and Supreme Court Justices of Bolivia remind me of my visit to our own nation's capitol. Sucre's main park looks like a Mini-Me version of Sydney's Hyde Park, sans giant fruit bats. The abrupt jutting rock fins and mountains between Sucre and Potosi could've been stolen from Southern Utah. The fried rabbit I ate looked just like the fried guinea pig, small charred leg and drumstick included, and the stir-fried cow stomach I ate brought back echos of my intestinal battles in Cuenca.

People too came back. Friends I'd made (drunkards I'd chatted with) in Loki Cuzco came to Loki La Paz, and the black medical studentess from the Machu Picchu train arrived just in time to help treat my Death Ride wounds. But most notable was a gap-toothed European on my mine tour who looked vaguely familiar. I didn't remember him, but he remembered me, the guy throwing the shit-fit in the Riobamba train station. He recognized me there from talking with me briefly in Baños (I didn't remember). He also apparently saw me in both Cuenca and Cuzco, but didn't bother to say hi, preferring to scare me with his stalker tactics on a later date. Oh, and apparently we were in Lima at the same time, but he doesn't run in the same circles of coke-addled couchsurfers.

I refer visiting the Altiplano as 'getting high', because everything here is over 3000 meters. At just over 4000, Potosi is the highest city in the world. The Death Ride started at 4700, and the Salt Flats break 5000, though you'd never notice in the nearly-flat moonscape. The altitude can give you shortness of breath, nausia, and lightheadedness, much like drinking a bottle of cough syrup, and the stock solution for the people is the mass consumption of coca leaves.

Now, don't think Bolivia is a country of coke growers; it takes over 100 kilos of coca leaves to make a kilo of cocaine, and I doubt most people can afford that much land. However, what little land they have is often devoted to coca, and people will often forgo growing and eating food to grow and shove a wad of coca leaves in their drooling maws. Coca leaves are allegedly not addictive, but every single miner in Potosi seemed to crave it constantly and in bulk. The green oozey mouths made me cringe.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The reason I came to the highest city in the world was not for the gloating factor (which is the reason I'm trying to reach Ushuaia, the most southerly city in the world and the literal end of the road), but for the silver mines. I don't mean to strike it rich myself, but a visit into these harrowing regulation-free collective mines is considered one of the most eye-opening experiences in South America. Considering Bolivia also yields the Witches Market (tourist dreck and magic potions and mummified llama fetuses, oh my!), the Death Ride, and the upcoming Salt Flats, I'd be remiss to miss such a thing. My scant 10 days in Bolivia promises to be nearly as hectic and upside-down as my two weeks in New Zealand.

A mine tour starts with a visit to the warehouse where we borrow our miner gear. Complete with boots, pants, waterproof coat, helmet, and headlamp, the gringos once again don a full tourist costume. We then, in full regalia, pay a visit to the miner's market, where we are of course the only people dressed in such goofy getups. The actual miners, we discover later, are wearing nothing but shorts and shoes. At the miner's market, we're expected to buy gifts for the miners; I have no complaints, since if I were toiling in a suicidal back-breaking job for years on end, and a bunch of priviledged happy-go-lucky snot tourists playing dress-up wanted to invade my private suffering to snap a few 'Look Ma!' pics and move on with their blessed lives, I'd damn well want some coca leaves and a pack of smokes out of it. I buy a bag of coca leaves, a large bottle of Coca-Cola (the real stuff, not the knockoff shit they try and peddle), and some dynamite.

A stick of dynamite costs 20 Bolivianos in the miner's market. That's about 3 USD, including the fuse and small bag of ammonium nitrite fertilizer to add some bang for your buck, so to speak. We each bought some.

The next stop was the refinery, where extraction chemicals such as mercury and cyanide sloshed around in rusty old machines attached to hand-crunching tumblers and slushers, with some fraying electrical cords thrown in for good measure. We didn't stay long.

A typically steep, slow, windy path brought us to the mouth of the mine where we finally flicked our headlamps on and crawled into the belly of the earth. Well, to be honest, we didn't do much crawling. About 70% of the time I was walking while crouched awkwardly, with my neck tilted up at an unpleasant angle. Another 10% was actually crawling. Another 10% was sloshing through a mysterious gray stagnant liquid which reminded me alot of subway juice. Standing upright was a rare sweet treat.

The loudmouth English-speaking tour guide spent most of his excess energy making mildly off-color jokes, typically involving Japanese people or homosexuals, and sexually harassing the girls in the tour, just like every other South American tour guide I've met. The porter in back silently hauled our heavy gear with no complaint or recognition or fair compensation, just like every other tour.

There wasn't much to actually see on the tour. Passageways of variously impractical width, rusting cart tracks, broken ladders, clogged wooden chutes, rotting wooden support beams, dangling electrical cords; the 'sites' were really more like obsticles. No, this tour was a tantalizing of the senses. The smell of stale dynamite and mold growing on those rotting beams. The taste of rock dust clotting up your nose and throat. The sound of hissing... something. The soft touch of bacterial colonies dripping off the ceiling like the fetal-alcohol lovechildren of stalagmites and snot. And the strange green glint of your headlamp reflecting off seams of the mineral serpentine, better known as asbestos.

Most of all, it was the heat. Potosi is cold, until you get a few meters underground. Then it starts to get warmer. The air is stale and still, and your sweat clings to you, gathering the ambient dust. It gets hotter still as you go further down, complimented by a thickening cloud of aerosoled debris. Sweat drips, your shirt sticks, and water won't quench anymore. You can't breath, you feel faint, suddenly claustrophobic. Your only thoughts are escape, to have mother earth let you out of her hellish womb. And make no mistake, this truly is Hell, brimstone included. But you can't escape, because you have 8 hours of wailing futily on a wall with a pickaxe ahead of you, just as you had many behind you and many more ahead until you die of asbestos exposure or a tunnel collapse. Welcome to the mines.

We didn't meet many miners down there, and I was glad we didn't. A few hauling carts filled to the brim with boulders (their labor will earn them perhaps 5 or 10 dollars today), others hustling to get back to their stakes before someone steals their precious ore. Only once inside did we stop to interact with working miners, who slowed their pace to humor our questions and photos in exchange for my soda. The older man had been working the mine much of his adult life, and didn't know how much longer he'd have. The younger man - no, boy - was new, and had a lifetime of this to look forward to. The boy seemed young, but mature. His muscles were firm, even 'ripped', and his face showed premature wear beguiled by his youthful smile. 16, 17 perhaps? No, 13, he said. I tried, and failed, to hide my stunned reaction. Either the mine had robbed this boy of his youth, or the mine had robbed this boy of education enough to know his own age. Either way, it depressed me something horrible, and I wanted to leave right then. Luckily, that's just what we did.

However, that still entailed climbing back up the way we came. We slid down on our butts like a slide; now we had to climb back up those near-vertical chalky faces. Breathing was harder than ever, but I didn't even think about it. Just one hand over the other, anything to get out. The one thought my conscious brain managed to project over the animal instict was to think that this experience was unlike anything I'd ever done before...

... But then I remembered that wasn't true, was it? I've seen plenty of abject suffering, poverty, and brutal toil in South America, it just happened to all be above ground. Even clamoring up those steep slopes recalled trying to escape those lava tube caves we'd explored during ESA New Mexico, and here we didn't have to contend with lava rocks and volcanic glass. I suppose the old saying is true, there's nothing new under the sun, even in places the sun fears to go.

Oh, and then we got to blow up some of that dynamite we bought, just for shits and giggles.