Tupiza, Tarija and the mouth of hell"

From Uyuni, I travelled on to Tupiza and then to Tarija with an ex-English teacher, Stewart, with whom I spent a happy week. Tupiza is a small dusty village that sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by interesting rock formations and canyons. I visited these on a large, black mare flecked with grey that knew the path so well that it wouldn´t obey my futile tugs to right and left, only obeying its master, a taciturn fifteen year old boy, who could send it into a gallop with a smacking of his lips. The problem was that the horse only knew two speeds, a stupefying plod that made you feel like a corpse lolling back and forth, and a gallop that forced me to grip the saddle with both hands and had a deleterious effect on my posterior. After the first hair-raising sprint, I resolved to just plod along, but the boredom overcame me again and again, with the result that I was never truly in control.

"Control" was an important theme for Stewart who was interested in Eastern spirituality and was reading a book called the "Bhagavad Gita". Wheras western philosophy treats the body and the mind as separate entities, eastern philosophy establishes no distinction between the mind and the universe. Drinking wine, cracking open peanut shells and playing backgammon, we discussed his philosophy. He believes that humans can achieve enlightenment, that an immutable core lies at the core of every individual (and therefore "the bourne from which no traveller returns" does not mark the end) and that you can choose to influence your environment in any instance. He contests that you can choose to roll a double four in backgammon; he himself admitted that this implies that he rejects reason and the enlightenment. What confused me was why he chose to reject reason in this case, and accept it in every other. During the time I spent with him, he never once walked towards oncoming traffic or threw himself off a building.

The city of Tarija is prim and wealthy. Tree lined flowerbeds line the streets and palm trees dot the central square. People there are whiter than they are in the rest of Bolivia, perhaps because many Andalucians emigrated to this area. As we ate empanadas and chicken in Plaza Sucre, we would watch the local bad boy set making circles of the plaza, boys hanging on to tailfins and music ripping through the soft night air. Despite the hulking hummers, though, child beggars wander the streets with a plaintive air, calling you "tio malo" if you don´t give them some money. On our second day in Tarija we visited a bodega in nearby, Valle de la Concepcion where we were taught to swill the wine, smell it and savour it by a camp Bolivian teenager. All his advice fell on dead ears. Even the most expensive wine was acid and astringent
, leaving your mouth and throat burning. This was made up for though, by another nearby bodega where a solid, self-styled campesino, called Jesus sold us a fantastic bottle of wine and showed us around his wine cellar.

From Tarija, Stewart and I went our separate ways, he to Bermejo and I to Potosi, the highest city of its size in the world. On the bus, I was squeezed against the window next to a huge indigenous woman whose layer upon layer of clothing must have hidden obesity (I have yet to discover how these women become fat on a diet of vegetable stew and the odd slice of llama). Potosi is a city of contradictions. The intricate stonework of the colonial mansions and the sumptuous churches belie the poverty of the tens of thousands of workers who made that wealth possible and continue to toil in terrible conditions, extracting silver, iron, lead and zinc. The cathedral´s adobe wals were washed away by heavy rains to be replaced by huge concrete slabs and the biggest bell in Bolivia, the core of which is made of gold. All this work was performed by slaves. Cerro Rico, where the metals are extracted, can be seen from all over town, an orange monolith cut into terraces so that lorries can beetle their way up the steep slopes. I was persuaded to take a tour of the mines on my first day in Potosi. We first visited the miners shop, where we were entreated to buy coca, drinks and explosives for the miners. The history of mining in Potosi explains why these humble gifts are so important.

The mine was originally owned by two powerful Spanish families who forced the miners to work as serfs. With the 1952 revolution, the mines of Potosi were nationalised, the workers were granted life and health insurance and education was provided for their children. In the years leading up to 1985, the price of tin fell and the cooperatives were formed; ten or more miners would approach the state and buy a concesion, giving them exclusive rights over a particular section of the mine. Despite the word "cooperative", the mining of today is a very individualistic business. The miners are not told where to work, they return only 30% of their profits to the cooperative and they have to buy all their own equipment. Ironically, the Iraq war increased the price of basic metals, enticing the young men of Potosi back down the mines where they worked up to 24 hours a day, conscious that their good luck could turn at any moment. The guide also let us try a liquour called quitasuenos (literally, take away you dreams) that the miners drink to dull the torment of a life spent underground in terrible conditions. It is 95% alcohol. They also make offerings of quitasuenos to the two spirits that preside over the mine, Tio and Cochamama (mother earth); inside the mine we saw a sculpture of the Tio, a red, devilish creature with a gaping mouth ready to receive the sacrificial offerings of the miners in return for their life and health (as the guide told us, Cerro Rico is a swiss cheese of winding tunnels and an article published today in the local newspaper suggested that the upper section of the hill has become structurally unstable). God does not exist in what a sixteenth century chronicler described as "the mouth of hell".

We then went to a processing plant where the silver is separated from the waste rock, before descending into the mine itself. The guide confided to us that much of the metal that is extracted nowadays is plena basura (complete rubbish). When the spanish first began digging holes into Cerro Rico, they found veins of silver that ascended up the rock like the trunk of a tree, splitting off into smaller veins. As Niall Ferguson recently explained in his "Ascent of money", the Spanish mined so much pure quality silver that they reduced the price of the metal on the international market. With the passage of time, the quality of the silver has been gradually decreasing and the miners have diversified into tin and other metals. A kilo of poor quality silver can sell for as little as 10bs. When you reflect that a safety helmet costs around 40bs, the mining seems barely profitable.

We entered the narrow entrance to the mine standing up, but were soon crouching down and shuffling through low, dark passages past carts and sweating miners stripped to the waist. In the light of our headlamps, we could distinctly see particles of dust, like snow round a streetlamp. On the walls hung thin, delicate strands of crystals that the guide explained to us were aspestos. The life expectancy of a miner in Cerro Rico is 45-50 years (even Glasgow doesn´t compare). As we delved down further into the mountain, passing from level to level, the passages became ever lower and narrower, forcing us to crawl, breathing in dust and touching walls smeared with stinking sulphurous deposits. The water bottle in my belt dug into my stomach and the fetid air meant that my breathing was laboured despite the red bandana that covered my face. At one point, we stopped in a low cavern to watch a miner at work. He was rythmically knocking a hole into the rock with a hammer ready for a stick of dynamite. In the gloom, we could make out his naked, muscular torsoe. He answered our questions with difficulty, in a hoarse, rasping voice that seemed barely human.

Like many miners, he left Cerro Rico in the 90s, couldn´t accomodate to life in the open air and crawled back down the narrow shafts. He was in his thirties, but seemed far older, with cheeks inflated with coca and sunken eyes. He was in the process of mining a sliver of a vein of silver, barely 2mm wide. Despite the fact that he had been working continuously for a month, he hadn´t yet blown out enough silver to sell. Miners who belong to the cooperatives may work up to 24 hours a day. They can´t urinate onto the rock because it releases methane, so they pee into their trousers instead. By thirty, a miner is considered done. Conditions have not improved yet under "Evo". To the sound of hammer beating against spike, we crawled back up again towards the light.