A silver bridge to Spain: Potosi

Both Oruro and Potosi lie at the very heart of Bolivia´s long, rich, and tragic mining history. While both cities continue to mine actively, Potosi has always been the bigger site with greater historical significance. In fact, in the 17th century, Potosi was the most important city in the western hemisphere--it was bigger than London or Paris at the time.

The source of this importance and fame was an obscenely rich silver deposit underneath a mountain called ¨Cerro Rico¨(Rich hill) which towers above the town. As soon as a few Spaniards got wind that the mountain was practically leaking silver, the fate of the people there (and many would say the fate of the country) was pretty much sealed. Over the course of the next several hundred years, silver mining, and more recently tin mining, has played a central part in Bolivia´s social and economic history, with Potosi as the site of several battles, and with miners at the center of several political upheavals and revolutions (including a miner blowing himself up at the capital with dynamite as recently as 2001). All told, the wealth that was taken from Potosi back to the Spanish crown is so great that it is said that you could construct a bridge, spanning from Potosi across the ocean to Madrid, made entirely of the silver they extracted.



Probably because of this significant history, Potosi is also home to a number of Bolivian cultural traditions, including the charango, that cool tiny instrument we mentioned earlier. It is culturally and historically significant enough to be a UNESCO World Heritage site. Our plans in town were pretty straightforward: to visit the center of Bolivia´s mining and monetary history, La Casa de la Moneda, and to pay a visit to a mine.

The Casa de la Moneda was Spain´s mint (and after independence, Bolivia´s mint) all the way until the 1950s or so. So much silver was being produced from Cerro Rico that when the Spaniards began using coinage, it was probably much easier to just produce the coins at the source. You can tell how important this site was to the Spaniards: at the time, it was one of only three mints in their empire: Lima, Mexico City, and Potosi. Now the site houses an extensive museum including bits of history from the mining and coining days, but also hosts a fair degree of Bolivian art, Bolivian minerals, and ostentatious silver products of the times. We particularly enjoyed checking out all the coins from across history as well as the intact simple mechanical machinery that they used to power the smelting of silver and the stamping of the coins. These massive donkey-and/or slave-powered apparatuses were hauled all the way from Spain, across the Andes, piece by piece, until they were assembled in Bolivia some 14 months later. Engineers, check out the ¨precision¨of the interlocking gear ratios, made entirely out of wood.



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The next thing on the list was to visit a mine. There were a number of tours that offered comprehensive tours of the mines, replete with hours and hours of crawling around through extremely cramped, noxious tunnels with sludge and slurry underfoot. Yes, they take tourists through active mining sites. In a way, this is ¨gonzo¨tourism, with people who go on these tours getting a pretty real (and thus miserable) perspective on the horrible realities of mining. Yet as hilarious as certain male-model movie scenes might be, we both felt that it wasn´t quite right to pretend to know the miners´experience with 3 hours of crawling through their mine while in reality theirs is a [short] lifetime of backbreaking, toxic labor.

With a healthy respect for their work and our own privilege, we decided on a much more subtle and admittedly convenient view on the mines: a quick visit to El Tio, the Lord of the underworld. This folkloric figure is said to oversee everything in the mines, including life, death, and bounty, and the fervent belief among miners is that El Tio will look after them if they look after him. So every day, at every separate tunnel entrance to every mine in Bolivia, miners (and visitors) will give El Tio a gift in return for his protection while they are inside. Mostly these gifts are in the form of vices like alcohol or cigarrettes. Since we didn´t have these on us, we though he might enjoy some orange Trident gum after his smokes and some coca candy to help with his hangover. See the side bar of this article for more info. on the El Tio legend as well as a review of what is said to be an excellent documentary on mining in Potosi.

Did we mention that we chose to visit this scary character in the middle of an unlit mine, with no flashlights, on Halloween? In Bolivia, they don´t really celebrate Halloween, although we did see a few kids´parades that were getting into the act, so give it a few years and the 31st will probably be a big holiday. What they do celebrate is called Dia de todos Santos, and it holds a more solemn significance than our Halloween or even Mexico´s Dia de los Muertos. Usually the holiday falls on the first 2 or 3 days of November. So on the 31st, we did see the town gearing up for the holiday, selling boatloads of bright pink bread and donuts (don´t they look like Homer´s favorite donuts on the Simpsons?), as well as special breads that are shaped like bodies and adorned with porcelain painted faces. These are the items that in the next two days will be placed beside the grave sites of the departed.



After our trip to the mine, we met two fellow travellers, Joanna and Julia, and struck up a friendship with them that would develop into several days of travelling together to our next destination, the official and unofficial capital of Bolivia, the ¨White city¨of Sucre.

Bolivian Badlands: Oruro and onward to Potosi

We departed La Paz in the morning and caught a decent-enough bus to Oruro. Most travellers would skip this town and head straight to Potosi, where there are a lot more places of interest. But I wanted to see Oruro because that`s the town where my mom was born. Other than that though, even other Bolivians say there`s not much reason to go there if it isn`t Carnaval. (During Carnaval, though, Oruro is THE place to be in all of South America!).

Oruro is a gritty town, in character and in...well, grit. The outskirts lie on a completely unprotected desert plain, which allows for an unceasing wind to tear through the area in violent and dusty gusts. On our way into town, we saw several maestroms of dirt blasting through several of the peripheral neighborhoods. It would have reminded us of the great Oklahoma dust bowl, had we actually been there.

Although the gritty intro to the town made us question how much time we wanted to spend there, I also absorbed my mom`s hometown with a fair degree of pride and admiration. I think of her as an extremely brave, tenacious, and resolute woman, and the sparse, tough town reflects these traits in spades. Taking in the harsh, ragged town where she was born served as an origin story of sorts, personifying the strength of her roots as if by the destiny of the place.

Matt! and I were able to book our next bus for about 40 minutes after we arrived. So we used that time to get to know the town beyond the bus station at the outskirts of town. In other words, we grabbed a taxi for a 5 minute ride to the plaza at the center of town, spent about 15 minutes there, and took a taxi back. That`s some efficient sight-seeing! But that little trip also added another great dimension to our Oruro visit. Further from the outskirts, the center of town is much more protected from the elements, and the plaza was one of the nicest we had seen throughout the whole trip. We were both really glad we made the effort to get a more complete picture of the place. Plus we bought some delicious donuts on the plaza for our lunch.

Donuts in hand, we continued on to Potosi, with several things to look forward to on the ride. Earlier, when I had wanted to theme our trip according to funny place names, Lago Poopo became a must-see destination in my mind, and luckily it was on the way! We also passed through some truly legitimate indigenous dwellings, and observed the ruins of some Tihuanaco (pre-Inca) funeral pyres among other unexplained round structures. And, so far from the tourist stops, we finally saw llamas as they are authentically raised--not just for photo opps within the cities. Herds and herds of llamas grazed freely along the slopes by the roadway, or loosely penned in by makeshift uncemented brick walls precariously stacked and miraculously untoppled by the wind. Finally, we were treated to a spectacular sunset across two canyons of the Altiplano before arriving into Potosi that night.

All in all, a great day on and off the bus.

La Paz: Loose soil, long lost friends, long lost wallet

The topography (geographical and physical) of La Paz makes it one of the most interesting cities on the planet. Arriving from the Altiplano, the city appears out of nowhere from beneath the flat plain like a gaping mouth full of red brick and tile.

The rim and walls of the canyon that nestles La Paz are covered with houses, slums, or buildings constructed on every habitable* space. Unlike most cities, the wealthy live at the bottom of the hills, and the poorest slums occupy the hilltops. The nicer neighborhoods further down in the valley benefit from warmer weather, sheltered from the harsh altiplano winds. Meanwhile, the slums are built at the very top are placed where there is the only room to grow--out of the bowl and onto the plains. At the top, El Alto, once considered only a slum of La Paz, has now grown so much that it is now Bolivia's third largest city.

* See description of Valle de la Luna below.

We were extremely fortunate to have a contact in La Paz: A long-lost friend of my mother's who I hadn't seen in about 18 years. Jackie used to live near my family in Arkansas, and a few years back she moved back to Bolivia. I looked her up and she was generous enough to host us in her lovely home with her awesome husband Lucho and rad son Sebi. Her hospitality turned what I thought would be a stressful stay in a crazy city into an unexpected chance to explore real life in La Paz and discover some of the coolest spots in Bolivia. It was also a chance to gain several pounds over a few days of delicious (and relentless!) home cookin'.

We spent the days exploring various parts of the city, uphill and downhill. We gorged on ice cream in the hipster modern part of town (which featured full blown quality coffee shops to Matt!'s delight), and passed through the old, narrow streets of the witches' market, where you can buy llama fetuses and other supernatural items that'll cure what ails ya. One night, we also went out to a Peña, a very fun and expeditious way to learn about a wide range of Bolivia's culture in just one evening. Peñas occur at a bar or restaurant, and they feature musical acts and dances from various areas of the country. Our particular MC and lead musician was really lively and talented, with a well-honed knack for being able to rock out tunes from everyone's country of origin on the Charango.

We were lucky to catch Jackie and her family on a weekend, so on that Sunday, we all went for an action-packed outing where we first visited the otherworldly Valle de La Luna (Valley of the Moon). Visiting this place is unsettling, not only because of the mystical landscape and soil formations, but also because upon inspecting these very loose and eroded structures, you realize that this is exactly the kind of soil that all of La Paz is built upon. Skyscrapers and houses across the entire canyon are built on what can be best described as slightly encrusted termite hills. Luckily, La Paz doesn't seem to be near any significant seismic activity. After Valle de la Luna, we drove to the bottom of the canyon to the agricultural valley where Jackie and Lucho have a small plot of land where they grow corn and veggies. And yes, we ate some of that corn later and it was delicious.

By the way, one of the best parts of this visit was hanging out with Jackie's 7 year old son Sebi. He's a great kid who's really into wrestling and all the other normal kid stuff. So, we had to get into the act as well. And note the awesome satirical wrestling poster that he found poking fun at all of Bolivia's political figures:

The only downside of this particular visit is that I joined the ranks of everyone else that I know that have been robbed in La Paz. It is a long story, but I'll just echo my mom's sentiment that Bolivians, particularly in La Paz, are the best thieves in the world. I made the mistake of leaving my wallet off my person (in a very snug chest jacket pocket with a difficult zipper), and it was either pickpocketed in an impossibly imperceptible way while we were walking the streets, or knicked for the brief period that I hung the jacket on a chair during coffee. In either case, I am left in awe at how suave and skilled the thieves were. The prime suspect? the smiling, gracious waiter at the cafe. Word to the wise: always keep your wallet in a place where you can feel it on your body--like your crotch. or at least in your front leg pockets. Because even though your jacket might be crammed into the most inaccessible corner of the most gringo restaurant with someone watching it, that doesn't make it safe around the most talented artisans of La Paz.

Well, I can't end on a sour note, so here's some more good stuff: In addition to hitting up the town, Matt! and I each got our own chances to do some side trips solo. I went for a truly Xtreme, wicked mountain bike ride (all singletrack, all downhill) with Gravity Bolivia, and Matt! took a trip up to Chacaltaya, the world's highest ski area at 18,274 feet. His trip was one of the most convenient ways to reach such a high altitude in less than a day. From there he was able to see some of the more spectacular peaks of the Cordillera surrounding the city.

By the way, now that I'm travelling without a credit card or debit card, I'm running up a tab with Matt until we get back. Has anyone borrowed money from Matt! before? Don't. The man is ruthless. His usury knows no bounds. I'm getting a sub-sub-prime interest rate and if I come home in a wheelchair with two broken knees, and bruises on my face, it is probably because he decided to collect early.

Flamingos, fish, and beer-soaked cars: Copacabana

Given the ordeal getting to Puno and the extra time it took to file the police reports, Matt! suggested that instead of trying to get to La Paz all in one day that same afternoon, we head to Copacabana, which would take less time. Copacabana is a lovely resort-ish town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, and I had kind of wanted to take the scenic route through there anyway, so his plan was genius.

Thankfully, we had one last experience in Peru that allowed us to leave without a sour taste in our mouth. Walking through Puno back to the bus station, we swung by a small little cafe across from the university. This was far from where gringos normally congregate, since most simply go from the bus station straight to the floating islands. In addition to a tasty lunch, we met the friendliest cafe owner who was genuinely interested in talking to us, and particularly gracious and hospitable. Even some other cafe patrons took a kind interest in us, and we were proud to declare that yes, people from the U.S. do sometimes go off the beaten path and eat where the locals eat. It was a great pick-me-up after the evening before and we got on the bus to Bolivia in high spirits.


On the way to Bolivia, we kept getting great glimpses of the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, including my first views of the pink flamingos that live in the area. We crossed the border at the town of Yunguyo, almost avoided paying the newly instituted $135 visa fee (drat!), and in no time we were in a taxi with three cholas (and their buckets of fish) headed toward Copacabana.






We didn´t have much on our agenda that night, except to try some trout from the lake, and to absorb some of Copacabana´s weekender charm, especially around the beach and the gleaming white moorish Catedral de Copacabana that presides over the town. The cathedral honors the Virgen de Copacabana, and she´s so important that people come from across Bolivia to seek her blessing. The best part is that when people purchase a new car (even as far away as La Paz), they will take their car to Copacabana on a Saturday morning so that the car can also be blessed, protecting the owner and any passengers that it will carry throughout its lifetime. We witnessed this ceremony on our way out of town, and it was fun to see a parade of cars decorated in flowers and wreaths, being doused with beer and holy water.

That last item of note from Copacabana will be of particular interest to our Alaskan friends who are familiar with the state ferry. Bolivians have a distinctly less-organized and decentralized approach toward carrying vehicles across expanses of water: Why note a rickety, wobbly barge for every vehicle, and separate speedboats for all the passengers?

Where in the world is Bolivia, anyway?

Ok, we´re now at least a week behind on posting, so it is time to catch up on what we´ve been up to in Bolivia. Do all the readers out there know that this is a homecoming of sorts for me? My Mom was born in Bolivia, so I´ve actually visited this country several times throughout my life, but this is the first time that I´m seeing more than just my family´s tropical home city of Santa Cruz.

Bolivia´s geography has fundamentally shaped the character of the different regions, so it is probably best to start with a quick lesson in the lay of the land. Starting from the West, from where we entered Bolivia in Copacabana, it is highland mountain territory. The huge steppe that runs north to south along and in between some ranges of the Andes is known as the Altiplano. This whole area is at a consistently high altitude, ranging from 9000 to 14000 feet (the peaks range much higher with the highest, Nevado Sajama at 21, 463 feet). La Paz is at around 12,000 feet, but luckily we´d already been altitude acclimated in Cuzco at about 11,000 feet.

Moving from West to East, the Altiplano gradually loses altitude until the sparse high plains transition into arable desert lands and canyons in the middle altitudes (very similar to New Mexico and Arizona), and continuing East into the tropical lowlands. (Continuing East all the way past Santa Cruz would land you in Brazil´s tropical plains). Roughly speaking, the Amazon areas are in the North and Northeast, and the excessively dry desert plains (such as the Salar de Uyuni) are in the Southwest.

Ok, that´s enough of a geography lesson. The quick take-away is that Bolivia is incredibly diverse: geographically, and by extension, culturally. You might imagine that this diversity would cause some rifts in Bolivian society, and you´d be right. Very roughly speaking, and very crudely labelling, there are at least two axes on which to place any given Bolivian: Indigeno or Mestizo, referring to whether someone has indigenous Andean blood (e.g. Quechua or Aymara), or whether they come from mixed blood (Spanish/European--¨white¨) descent. I must repeat that these are tremendously crude distinctions, because over the course of centuries, these two cultures have lived together, humped and intertwined, and have thus adapted to each other, so that the racial distinction is most informative only at the two opposite ends of the spectrum, and my opinion is that most Bolivians (at least in the major cities) fall somewhere in between.

The other gradient on which to describe Bolivians is geographic: The crude terms for these are ¨Collas¨ from the highland states, and ¨Cambas¨from the lowland states. Although each area uses the terms for the others somewhat derogatorily, in my mind these are meaningful distinctions because you can definitely notice the differences between Cambas and Collas in terms of their style of speech and mannerisms.

More recently, all of these geographic and cultural differences have manifested themselves in a great deal of political turmoil. Without a doubt, this is nothing new. Just about all of Bolivia´s history has been characterized by unrest, uprisings, overthrows, and instability. I´ll only mention the most recent conflicts with the most recent President, since this stage of history is particularly interesting, and for our visit, quite omnipresent. It will also inform several upcoming Blog posts. And I will only give the Cliff´s notes version. Let´s see how quickly I can summarize:

In 2005, Bolivia elected its first indigenous Aymara president, a guy named Evo Morales. This made international news. Given his broad political base (about 60% approval rating nationwide), he had the latitude to start shaking up the status quo, especially with regard to giving more to the historically underrepresented (yet majority) indigenous, poor population. On paper, this was obviously a good power-to-the-people story. But there´s a lot more to it. Several observers (including my family) hold quite a bit of concern about Evo´s reckless style of governing, his appointment of cronies to important technocratic cabinet positions, regardless of expertise or education, his past as the leader of the coca grower´s union (linked to cocaine trafficking), his very intimate alliance with Venezuelan populist-turned-dictator Hugo Chavez, and his cavalier and confrontational relationship with the United States. (By the way, I´m not offended that he booted the U.S. ambassador out of the country or that he blasts U.S. imperialism in his rhetoric--that´s fair. What isn´t fair is that these actions, for such an economically dependent country, have serious consequences for his own people). As always, it is difficult to sift through the rhetoric on this--U.S. newspapers probably don´t give the man a fair shake, and leftist/socialist news outlets don´t ever acknowledge the risks and downsides of what he is doing. Sift through it yourself at http://news.google.com, and enter search terms such as ¨Evo Morales¨or ¨Santa Cruz, Bolivia¨or ¨Bolivia constitution.¨ Just one caveat--most of the news refers to Santa Cruz as the ¨rich and white¨part of the country--know that it isn´t that simple, as there are plenty of poor and middle class people in every corner of the country. I don´t think that particular label for Santa Cruz is fair.

What Evo is doing is pretty wide-ranging, and it is at the heart of the recent turmoil. It is a classic federal vs. states´rights issue. With a national majority (centered in the highland states), he has nationalized big chunks of the energy industry and also proposed a big land redistribution program, as well as a pension program for the elderly. Within his base, these are tremendously popular reforms. But they come at the expense of the Camba lowland states, which have been developing their economies based on gas and agricultural revenues. So when Evo says he wants to break up large landholdings to give to the nation´s poor, he´s talking about agriculturally productive land that gives jobs to many middle class Camba Bolivians (including some of my cousins). Similarly, the lowland states used to have more of a say in where their oil and gas revenues went, but now those revenues are being controlled at the federal level and being distributed disproportionately to Evo´s friends and supporters around La Paz and other highland states. All of this is being debated in the lens of a constitutional referendum where Evo wants to make these seismic shifts in redistribution permanent. The lowland states, known as the ¨Medio Luna¨--(¨half-moon¨see the crescent of states from Northeast to Southwest on the map--Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, and Chuquisaca) have opposed the constitutional changes under the grounds that a) the reforms unfairly favor the highland majority, so the minority protection of federalism is at risk, b) their prior autonomy over locally produced economic growth is being stripped away, and c) that the new constitution gives far too much power to the executive branch, with fears of a full-socialist agenda under a very popular Evo Morales.

This conflict resulted in some violence this past September, and the country was in a a very tense state of panic and instability which had Matt and I worried about whether we´d even be able to visit. It got resolved in recent weeks, with the biggest concession to the Camba states being that Evo would not seek a third presidential term. That seemed to diffuse the violence at least until January, when the new constitution gets put to a vote by the people. It is expected to win, at the expense of lowland autonomy.

Ok, that should give all of you lovely readers a good base of understanding to know where we are in Bolivia and what we´ve been encountering. I promise future posts won´t be nearly this egg-headed. To be sure, most of what we´ve been doing has been our usual fun hijinks and silliness. But some of the most meaningful moments in the country have had all of this in the background.

I´m particularly interested in seeing some comments! (yes, we get lonely when we don´t hear from you). So pipe up and send us a note on any of the posts you read. It really means a lot to us. More stories to come!