Wow. The Bolivian salt flats took our breath away. Not only because of their sheer enormity, and because of their dizzyingly high altitude, but also because we were travelling across them with too many people crammed into our four-by-four.
We were also a bit giddy from the night before when we had stayed in a salt hotel. The salt hotel is Bolivia’s answer to Lapland’s ice hotel, everything is made of salt. The floor is ground salt, the walls are salt blocks, the beds are made of salt, the tables and chairs are made of salt, literally everything (but not the toilet, which was a bit disappointing). The giddiness probably came from licking the walls, something that everyone does, to prove the hotel is made from salt. Trust us, it’s pretty salty, and pretty grubby.
When you arrive on the salt flats all you can see for hundreds of miles is flat, white salt, stretching almost to infinity. It is completely disorientating, there are no land marks and there is no perspective. Even under the ground the salt stretches metres and metres deep, the result of a ocean drying up millions of years ago. It is probably the most bizarre landscape on earth, which lends itself nicely to a photo session. The lack of perspective allows you to create crazy snaps that appear to show people climbing out of wine bottles, leaning on guide books or being crushed under someone’s enormous looking foot.
Hundreds of pictures, some sunburn, two flat tyres and a bumpy ride later saw us arrive in a town called Uyuni. Uyuni’s main claim to fame is that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once stayed there, and they have a collection of rusting Victorian trains, which they say were shot up by the famous bandits. We staged our own mock shoot out by running along the roofs of the rusty machines, some of which were almost as decrepit as those in use from Medway to London. That was about all there was to do in Uyuni, so the next day we left for the mining town of Potosi.
The bus to Potosi was a bit of a disappointment after the luxury we’d been used to in Chile and Argentina – the kind which has to be sprayed twice with air freshener before it’s reasonably safe to get on, and the kind where you can’t put your feet on the floor because it’s awash with foul smelling urine.
Things took a bit of a down turn when one of the roads we came to, if you can call a dirt track a road, was flooded. Our clever driver decided to take an off road short cut. Suffice to say he got the bus stuck in the mud. Now what could have been quite easily resolved with a spade and a few rocks quickly turned into a complete fiasco as the impatient driver kept revving until all the wheels and the exhaust were completely buried. We spent the next two hours sitting around while he tried to dig us out with a pick axe until finally a JCB driver arrived to help....or so we thought.
The clever individual thought it would be a good idea to tie the tow rope on to the plastic front bumper. Of course when he pulled away he took off the entire front of the bus, radiator and all. It was all quite funny for us, particularly when a six year old kid pulled out a screw driver and started trying to fix all the wires that were hanging out. The humour ended when they made us get back on the bus. Ended up being a pretty hairy journey to Potosi.
Potosi used to be the world’s most wealthy town, due to the Conquistadors’ discovery of silver. The majority of silver in the royal households of Europe was mined by slave labour in Potosi. The Spanish invaders forcing the once proud Incas under ground in treacherous conditions to blast and cut rock rich in the precious metal. Hundreds of thousands died in the deep dark tunnels. Which may be one reason they turned to worshipping the Devil. Each mine has an effigy of a horned, goat like beast which they placate with offerings of booze and fags.
The deposits of silver in Potosi are so vast they are being still being mined today, more than 400 years since work began. The worrying thing is, working conditions have barely changed. Most of the work is still done by hand and death and injury is common. Most miners can expect to die before their mid forties.
Wondering what these hellish conditions were really like we booked ourselves on to a tour of the mines. Tour guide Jonny used to be a miner until he learned English and became a guide. It probably saved his life. Jonny explained that before we entered the mines we had to buy presents for the miners, so we were taken to a market and sold a miners goody bag, containing everything they love. Inside were hundreds of Coca leaves, the plant that is refined into Cocaine, chewing the bitter green stuff gives you a buzz and keeps you working. There was also 96 per cent proof alcohol, basically white spirit, which was not to clean their shovels but to get them so drunk they wouldn’t care about risking death every day and there were some very rough hand rolled cigarettes, rolled with paper that was almost as thick as card. Basically a good night out in Chatham.
Jonny also let us buy something a bit more deadly, a stick of dynamite, which he gleefully lit and threw at us to hold before he lobbed it and it exploded, destroying a small heap of freshly mined rock and shaking the mud hut houses to their foundations.
As we ventured underground it was clear this was not a trip for claustrophobics. The walls were narrow and the tunnel roof only a few feet high. It was wet, and hot because of the lack of ventilation and fresh air. We had to turn back a few times because of rock falls and flooding. Needless to say after an hour of crawling in the darkness we were very relieved to be back in the sunshine and took advantage of it for a few days before we headed to Bolivia’s bustling capital - La Paz.