Bolivia Part 2 - Hunt for the missing Charrangos, Explosions & the stuff of dreams

Leaving La Paz we decided to head on & continue our Charrango hunt, heading for the supposed 'Bolivian Charrango Capital' - the small village of Aiquille. To get there we passed through the city of Cochabamba, staying for a couple of nights, which had little of interest to offer. Moving on down to Aiquille we arrived to find a town that appears to live on a diet solely of deep fried chicken & chips, literally all we could find to eat anywhere for both dinner & breakfast...nice!

The local dialect out here in the middle of nowhere was almost like a completely different language, & we really struggled to understand or make ourselves understood - possibly a contributing factor in the fact that we could not find a Charrango workshop for love nor money, apart from 2 shops that had a poor collection of badly made instruments - far fewer options than anywhere else we had been so far in Bolivia. Eventually we decided to throw the towel in on the Charrango hunt & get the hell out of Aiquille & onto somewhere that resembled civilisation again...easier said than done when you are in the backwaters of Bolivia - the next bus not passing through the town until 2am the following morning. Not feeling like another few meals of chicken & chips we decided to hunt down a taxi driver to ferry us the 3.5 hours onto Bolivia's 2nd city of Sucre.

So we found a guy who had a taxi sign in the windscreen of his battered old Toyota (everything is old Toyota's in Bolivia - most of Peru & Ecuador as well in fact) - complete with 2 entirely bald back tyres & we negotiated ourselves a reasonable price for the journey, on the condition that he got his tyres changed before we set off - agreeing to this, he told us to return in an hours time when he would be ready to go. So return in an hours time we did to find the tyres still completely bald & our taxi driver dressed up in a dentists uniform tending to patients! After going through the routine of him saying 'oh I didn't think you were serious' he proceeded to shut up his dentists practice for the day, grab a packed lunch off his Mum (chicken & chips naturally) & we set off down the road to get the tyres replaced with some that had marginally more tread on than the previous pair, & we proceeded on down the 3.5hr dirt track journey to Sucre.

Our drivers name was Jhonny & he was actually a really nice very chatty bloke, telling us all about how he studied for 6 years to be a dentist, though has to double up as a taxi driver to supplement his income - often making more from a days taxi-ing than dentistry. He also told us that he was one of only a handful of people in Aiquille with any form of education at all, most of the people there, as in many places in Bolivia have no education at all, children being put out to work shining shoes, begging or whatever when they should be in school, resulting in large sections of the population being almost completely illiterate save for possibly being able to write their own names.

Everywhere you go in Bolivia - even in the smallest towns, the only form of advertising you see is not billboard posters, but houses or buildings painted with one of two things - either a branding of a mobile phone company (in places where it is hard to believe that many people can really afford a mobile), or political sloganeering. The current Bolivian president - Evo Morales, who has been in power since 2006, is the first Bolivian president of indigenous background & heritage, providing Bolivia with one of the most stable politcal periods it has ever known & even though he has left many promises unfullfilled since he came to power, he still remains incredibly popular - particularly among the people of the Altiplano (highlands). Everywhere there are slogans of 'MAS EVO' - MAS being both an acronym for the party name (Movimiento Al Socialismo) & being the Spanish word for 'more'.

As head of the Socialist government, Evo Morlaes is a self styled United States worst nightmare in Latin America. The parties main objectives are to provide more power to the indigenous communities via land reform, re-distribution of gas wealth & by heading up a movement to resist the eradication of Coca production in Bolivia - as being enforced by the US. Coca obviously being the raw ingredient used for making Cocaine - though the unharmful raw leaf is a large part of Andean culture, used for chewing & making a tea type drink called 'Mate', & has a tradeable value in its own right offering a form of income to otherwise poor farmers.

Bolivia is also the country where the CIA finally killed Che Guevara in the '60's, & when you think about it it is exactly the sort of thing that Evo Morales is now doing that Che Guevara was trying to encourage at the time - it's just taken some 40 odd years after his death for it to start to become any form of reality here!

Things weren't always this way for Bolivia though, & during the Spanish colonial days the cities of Sucre & especially Potosi were among the richest cities in the world, up there with Paris & London due to the amount of mineral wealth in the mountains. Sucre today still maintains an aire of grandeur about it, & the wealth of grand colonial buildings that line its streets are still whitewashed every 2 years to keep the place looking pristine.

Sucre is now the university city of Bolivia & its streets are filled with the more fortunate Bolivian's who are able to get an education. Sucre definitely has the nicest feel about it of all the built up places in Bolivia we have visited so far with a lively cafe & bar culture. While here we treated oursleves to the rare luxury of a nice hotel for a few nights - after several nights of some pretty grim accomodation out in the Bolivian hinterlands.

After Sucre we headed south onto Potosi - the wealthiest of all the cities in the America's in the 1600's due to the mountain full of silver that overlooks the city. The mountain is called Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), & has been plundered for hundreds of years to now within an inch of it's life at great human expense, as the unregulated mines regularly have children as young as 11 or 12 working there & the amount of deaths during the main silver rush period stretched into the thousands.

Potosi today has kept its grand colonial buildings around the main plaza, though the surrounding areas & suburbs no longer bear any signs of a once great city, with poverty now rife. While here, Claire & I took a tour out to the mines, which is a pretty mad experience. On the way to the mines we stopped off at a miner's supply store where you are encouraged to buy dynamite to give to the miners as a gift. Freely available over the counter for anyone to buy, we bought a couple of sticks of dynamite complete with fuse & accelerant all neatly packaged into a little bomb bag & got back on the bus - now loaded with about 20 sticks of dynamite & carried on up the road...feeling somewhat vulnerable!

We made our way into the mines, fully kitted out with helmets, head torches & dynamite & proceeded to make our way down the shafts into the bowels of the mountain. Resembling pot holing more than it did mining, we crawled on our hands & knees through mine shafts about 3-4ft in diameter, heading down steep & slippery angles deeper into the mountain. There is no ventialtion once you get into the mine & the heat & the dust is pretty uncomfortable, temperatures reaching up to 40 deg C. The miners here regularly work between 12 & 24 hour shifts, the drink of choice to keep them going is a mix of lemonade & a spirit which is 96% proof, resulting in many drunk, tired people working in these horrendous conditions, so naturally accidents & deaths continue to be a major part of daily life.

Deep in the mine we sat & had a chat & shared a little of the potent drink with a family that had formed an independent mining company. By law you have to be 18 to work the mines, but no one regulates it at all. The youngest of the brothers we met claimed to be 17, though was clearly no more 14 or 15 at most. Our guide told us this was not unusual, & there are still regularly kids of 11 or 12 who act as the goffers for their brothers & fathers down here. While we sat chatting to them a series of 3 dynamite explosions went off in the tunnels below - an unnerving experience as the entire place shook. Due to the fact the mountain has been mined so heavily over the years it is now proving more difficult to find any veins of silver, & as a result they have started blasting shafts within 12 meters of other tunnels - the safety standard apparently being 30 metres between tunnels, making the potential for collapse now much greater...obviously they don't actually tell you this until you are well & truly inside the mine!

We clambered our way back up the rabbit warren that is the mine shafts, pleased to be back above ground. It was here that the guides set off the few remaining sticks of dynamite we had left, so from a relatively safe distance we stood back & watched the bombs go off - health & safety being even less of a concern in Bolivia than it was in Guatemala apparently...

The locals of Potosi say that Cerro Rico stands like a tombstone over the city, & after seeing a little of the daily realities inside the mine it is easy to see why.

We stayed at a nice hostel in Potosi which was really good for meeting people, & from here we hooked up with a group of travellers & jumped on yet another bus (7 hours off road) & made our way down to the star of the Bolivian show - the Uyuni Slat Flats & surrounding otherwordly landscapes that lead down to the Atacama Desert & the Chilean border.

Our group consisted of our driver, Ronaldo - & the 6 of us. 2 Spanish girls, a Swiss guy & a half Mexican / half English guy - all of whom were really good company for the 3 days we spent together, witnessing some of the most bizarre & impressive landscapes you are ever likely to see. We decided on a 3 day tour, tailormade to our requirements as we wanted to cram as many of the sights in as possible, but still leave Bolivia at its southern most tip and enter Chile at San Pedro de Atacama.

The first day was spent predominantly on the Uyuni salt flat - a 12,000 sq km expanse, making it twice the size of the Great Salt Lake in the States, & the largest in the world. Driving across the salt offers a bizarre sight, brilliant white hexagonal salt formations in all directions, with the cones of ancient volcanoes intermittently poking through the salt crust creating islands, some covered in cactii up to 12 metres tall. The clear blue sky & the pure white of the salt create mirages on every horizon, that act as mirrors against the islands, & give them the appearance of floating in space.

Considering the size of the salt flats, it is reassuring to know that there is only an area of some 20 sq kms that is set aside for salt extraction for commercial purposes. Little mounds of salt of 3ft high litter this area while the salt is left to dry, as the moisture evaporates ready to be taken away for processing. None of this salt is exported, all of it being consumed soley within Bolivia. The rest of the salt flats is a natural reserve, however it has been discovered that beneath the salt flats lies up to half of the worlds remaining reserves of Lithium - something that is in ever greater demand in our battery hungry societies. The main source of interest for this Lithium is for use in providing power to the super powered batteries required to run Hybrid & Electric cars. Currently the Bolivian government has given an area of the suppossed reserve over to a French company for Lithium exploration. The downside of all of this is that in order to access the Lithium they have to completely remove all the salt - so in theory if enough Lithium is found & enough companies wave enough cash at the economically crippled Bolivian Government, the salt flats could completely disapear in a relatively short space of time.

The more you hear about the negative side effects of producing these so called énvironmentally friendly´vehicles (massive deforestation to make way for Bio-fuel crops, pushing the cost of the crops way above the affordable level for many of the people in 3rd world countries where they are grown & who rely on them for food, the potential disapearance of the salt flats etc...) makes you realise what a complete farce it all really is. The sooner Hydrogen powered vehicles become a more feasible reality the better - it´s not like we would drain an Ocean or anything... ;-)

We end the day at a small town called San Juan where we visit the Necropolis, an ancient burial site of the Ayamaran people where mummies were found in petrified coral tombs that date back over a thousand years.

On day 2 after a cold night in a very basic hostel room, we cross through the other side of the Salt Flats and through to the Valley of Rocks, a high altitude desert terrain (Siloli Desert), with red rock landscapes all around, mountains of multiple colours due to the variety of mineral content and rocks that have been battered so heavily by the elements over millenia that they now resemble the shape of trees.

We move on visiting red, green & white lagoons all filled with pink Flamingoes until we reach the second nights accommodation at Laguna Colorada (Red lake) some 4278m above sea level, so named from its red colour caused by the effect of the wind and sun on the microorganisms that live in it. The shores of the lake are encrusted with Borax and so provide a bright white backdrop.

Nightime is especially cold and was even more so here were the temperature dropped to below minus 20C, & the basic accomodation we stayed in for the couple of nights spent out here obviously had no form of heating. We were sleeping in all the layers of clothing we had, wrapped in a sleeping bag under 2 blankets & were still cold!

Day 3 was a very early start (4am) to catch the sunrise at the 'Morning Geysers' an hours drive away. We arrive to the smell of sulphur, gurgling mud and spewing smoke & water high into the air. We continue on to an area called ´The Desert of Dali´due to it´s resemblance to the surrealist dreamscapes of a Salvador Dali painting.

The entire trip is carried out at above 3500m´s, reaching almost 5000m at the highest point, & unless in direct sunlight it gets painfully cold. A small price to pay though for what you see - all the weird & wonderful landscapes combining to make it feel like a completely different plant.

It was here in the middle of the desert, beside a towering 6000m volcano & a bright green lagoon (Laguna Verde) that we jumped out of our 4WD & crossed over the Bolivian border into Chile. Bolivia is definitely a country that generates strong feelings - some of it incredibly frustrating, some of it incredibly sad & some of it that might just qualify as one of the best places you are ever likely to visit - all in all a fantastic experience & a great 3 weeks. Hasta luego Bolivia!