Bolivia

It's always nice to find a tour agency in a non-English-speaking country, that advertises having services available in English. But when the advertisement for this service is written in dubiously-grammatised English, it does make you just a little apprehensive of the quality of said service. Here's a photo of the sign for a tour agency here in Potosí — the sign reads: "the guide speak English". Is that so? Well, if he does, then I hope it's better than yours! :P

After we finished our tour of the Potosí mines today, we had some fun outside. Our tourguides got three of our packages of dynamite, ammonium nitrate, and fuse; ran about 50m down the road with them; and then ran back before they exploded. One of the packages got stuffed inside a cute little teddy bear. Poor little guy left this world with a big bang. Check out the video here.

Today, I went on the famous tour of the mines of Potosí: the No. 1 thing to do here in Potosí, and the main reason why tourists come to this town at all. The tour was very dark, very cramped, very asphyxiating, and very disturbing. The mountain of Cerro Rico currently has 15,000 miners working in 400 mines, in positively hellish conditions. The mountain has been constantly mined for over 400 years. Experts predicted about 10 years ago that the mountain had about 7 years left, before the whole thing came crashing down, due to its foundations being literally "undermined". And it's still going.

Some towns only have one place worth staying at. The Koala Den in Potosí is one of those places. Quite friendly, with a nice little lounge area to chat with ye 'ol fellow travellers, and a great TV / dining room as well (excellent collection of DVDs!). Also has quite an extensive 2-for-1 book exchange collection. And, very importantly, it's a warm "den" (as its name suggests) in a very cold town.

Since there's absolutely nothing to do in Sucre, we decided to get out of here today, after only one day here. On the bus to Potosí today, there was a guy selling little stapled-together books to his fellow passengers. Chris and I weren't interested in any of his offerings; but I was in a position, smack-bang in the middle of the bus, where I ended up passing all the sold books down the bus, and passing all the money and change up and down, between salesman and buyers. As a reward for my services, the guy gave me a free little comic book of crude, raunchy Bolivian jokes. Bit more Spanish bedtime reading.

As I discovered at Parque Cretácico this morning, there really isn't much to do in Sucre. For some reason, absolutely nothing — not cafés, not general stores, not pharmacies — seems to be open before about 4pm. It's a totally lazy and useless place. There's nothing at all to do in town, during the day. Nothing, that is, except hang out at the Joyride Café, the No. 1 gringo haunt in town, and the only place that actually is open when you need it to be. That's how we ended up spending breakfast, lunch, dinner, and most of the time in between in Sucre, sitting in the Joyride Café. Nice place: but Sucre could certainly use a few more places to eat and, well, do something.

There really wasn't much to do when Chris and I arrived in Sucre this morning, after our interesting night's bus ride. So we decided to check out Parque Cretácico, a site where you can see dinosaur footprints embedded in the face of a rock wall, and one of Sucre's main tourist attractions. Very cheesy place, and not terribly awe-inspiring, either. But like I said, there wasn't really much else to do in Sucre. So we had a look at the footprints.

Chris and I were hoping to catch either the 8pm or the 8:30pm bus this evening, from La Paz to Potosí. But when we got to the bus station, at 6:30pm this evening, the seats on both of these buses were completely sold out. However, they did have two seats left (the last two) for the bus to Sucre, which left — well — immediately, at 6:30pm! So we immediately bought the two final tickets, ran to the bus, whacked our luggage underneath, and jumped on. And that's how we ended up going to Sucre tonight, instead of to Potosí.

Bolivia is an amazing country; but sadly, this is despite its culinary offerings. Fortunately, there are plenty of exotic gringo restaurants in La Paz, offering many of the fine foods that we crave from back home, and that give us a break from the positively ordinary local food of Bolivia. Last Thursday night, I dined on some delicious Beef Vindaloo at the Star of India restaurant. And today, I had some great Red Curry Thai Chicken at Maphro On.

This morning's climb of Huayna Potosí was very hard. But it turned out that getting to the top was the easy part. Once we reached the summit, we had to climb and hike all the way back through the ice, to the high camp; and then straight away, we had to continue hiking down, all the way to base camp. I was already dead when I reached the top of the mountain; but by the time I'd done the additional 5 hours or so of hiking to get back to base camp, I was semi-human. Mountain climbing lesson number 1: getting to the top is only half the journey. Once you get there, there's no helicopter waiting to take you back down.