Mining Dinosaurs and Caving

From Uyuni we went to Potosi which is know as one of the richest cities in the world when the Spanish first descovered it as it has a huge hill known as Cerro Rico (Rixh Hill) which was full of silver and funded the Spanish for many years. The town has silver mines still but the silver has run out so its mainly poor miners digging with handtools in unbelievably bad conditions still using dynamite etc. We wanted to go down into the mines which you can but I got hit by a bad case of sickness, which had me bed ridden for a day with a constantly bubbling stomach, a bit shaky and in need of a toilet about every 20minutes; and so a 5 hour tour underground in the dark didnt sound so good...

We did however go for a wander to the tower observatory and from there spotted a silver refinary (i tihnk) and so walked down to see what it was like. We looked over the wall and took a few snaps. One of the workers spotted us and called out. He said we could go in and look around if we wanted in exchange for a few coca leaves (which the miners chew nonstop) so we went in. It was a tad scary as they told us how toxic raw silver is while swishing their hands through the crushed rocks as it was being sprayed with water. Inside we wandered about pools where the silver was filtered and then let back into the river (!). We had no coca to pay with but left the 5 men with about 5 pounds for their quick tour and their faces lit up... a fiver buys a lot of coca leaves in Bolivia!

After Potosi we headed for Sucre where we ´accidently´ booked into a really comfortable hotel in an old colonial building. We immediately liked the place despite the traffic cruches at certain corners and the buses spewing out black plumes of exhaust fumes. The food was good and we settled into a more comfortable life instead of the freeeezing cold of Potosi.

We took a taxi out to the dinosaur prints that were found at a cement factory on the edge of town. The cars here tend to switch sides of the road depending on the pot holes. It´s actually more dangerous to stay in your lane! The footprints are of loads of different types of dino, some walking in pairs, some running and one of a veloceraptor jumping (presumably to eat another dino). The park also had cheesey life size plastic replicas which made noises.. nice. After this we went back into town to find a wicked museum of Festival masks from all over Boliva -they are amazing - some of weird manga-esque women, some of devils with boggle eyes and many many others... wait for the pics...

From Sucre we travelled up to Cochabamba and found ourselves at 1am being driven by a worrying bloke to a hotel in the worst neighbourhood. The hotel was actually fine but we had bad first impressions of Cochabamba - it was manically busy with markets everywhere. Once we actually explored and got to the center of town it changed miraculously into a sophisticated cafe area and the nothern part was posh with high rise buildings and pretty churches. We had some good Turkish food in a nice resturant, rank cocktails in a really cool bar and I even got a hair cut by a woman who first used a blowtorch to clean the blades of the shaver and a cutthroat razor to trim my neck.

From Cochabamba we took a tour out to Torotoro to see more Dinoprints (this time on the ground and not upright like a wall) and to go caving and walking in the canyon. We took a bus that was more like a monster truck which played kung-fu movies at full blast to try and drown out the noise of the engine and failed. We spent about 6 hours listening to the noisiest music we owned with sunglasses and caps on to shade our eyes from the light of the blarring TV, driving over roads that were rugged and had occasssional waterfalls or streams crossing them. When we finally got to the hotel we were beddraggled.

The tour guide the next day was a lad of 17 called William who had been a guide at the National Park for 8 years and that day was training up a lad of about7 and a girl of 11 or so. He took us to see the prints and hiking in the canyon. We saw green macaws swooping around the edges. Day 2 we went caving in a vast network of caverns in the National Park. "Your supposed to have helmets but we dont have any so be careful" said William as we entered. The surrounding hills were amazing! The caves were incredible and we clambered, ducked, army crawlled and pulled ourselves up waterfalls and past stalagtites with a gang of Cochabambinos who were living in Virginia USA.

Back in Cochabamba we headed towards the Bolivian capital of La Paz...