A day in Potosi

Thursday 24 April

I was keen to do a tour of the silver mines while in Potosi, which was something Michelle was not at all keen on doing - she´s somewhat claustrophopic. After arriving at our hostel at 2:30am I was having a hard time deciding if I could be bothered getting up early enough to do the tour. I did manage to drag myself out of bed in time to have a quick breakfast and dash off to a tour agency, and I was very glad that I did.

All of the mine tours are guided by ex-miners. Our guide had spent a reletively short five years in the mines before becoming a guide. Fortunately his English was very good, he gave a great idea overview of the different systems the miners work under, and what they prefer. The conditions are pretty harrowing, we only spent a couple of hours in the mines, and that was more than enough. Upon entering the mine, which has been worked for about 500 years, I was thinking it wasn´t too bad, and that Michelle may have found it ok after all. The first level was reasonably cool, the air wasn´t too dusty and the tunnel was plently big enough. As soon as we started to descend to level two I realised I was wrong, the tunnel descending down was a tight awkward passage, leading to tight, hot tunnels thick with dust. Breathing became difficult through the bandana I´d bought to keep the dust out.

The miners used dynamite to blast the ore, shovelled it by hand into trolleys that ran on rails, which they then halled by hand to vertical shafts. They dumped the two tonne loads onto the floor, shovelled into rubber buckets that were winched up the shafts by electric winches. Four miners managed 400 tonnes of ore a day. In the past it took 40 miners to mine 200 tonnes a day without the trolleys and winches, carrying the ore in sacks on their backs. Ironically they see these advances as great progress.

One of the guys in another group asked about the fatality rate in the mines - and apparently it´s about 60 mining related deaths per year, about 40 of which are from lung damage due to the dust. He was told that on a per-person basis they have fewer accidents per year than other mining operations throughout the world. I don´t think that´s particularly relevant as so many people are exposed to the risk, especially compared to the rate of ore the extracted - also their accident reporting´s probably not to the same standard as those of operations in developed nations. (Bolivia is consider "third world" by the way). They also don´t employ mining engineers, they have the attitude that they´ve been mining for more than 500 years, so they know what they´re doing better than anyone else!

Anyway, to demonstrate their dedication to health and safety we had a bit of a play with dynamite at the end of the mine tour, the guides lit the stuff, ran off to a safe distance, dropped the dynamite and ran back. The fuses took about ten minutes to burn, and their ability to judge the timing well was demonstated by the bit of video I captured - their countdown was accurate to a few seconds.

Michelle had a rather frustrating morning trying to sort out bus tickets for us - she spent most of the morning walking around trying to find the bus terminal, hindered in the process by misdirections given by the locals.

I will eventually update this post with a couple of video clips if I can, but that probably won´t happen 'til I get back home, which really is that far off...