Arrived in to Potosi, whos claim to fame is that they're the highest city in the world. Thankfully, after spending the last few weeks in altitude, this didn't hit us straight away. I think a perhaps more remarkable thing about this relatively small city is that it has 35 different churches - our city tour later in the day covered but a few of these, all very gorgeous - given that I love churches so much, it's my kinda city. Our city tour also included checking out the local market, complete with cows noses for sale ... now what exactly Bolivians do with these I'm not sure - and no one was particularly forthcoming with questions about it either!

The afternoon was spent doing the main tourist attraction of Potosi - the Silver mines. This used to be one of Bolivia's main cities due to this industry - it's huge here and most people who live here are miners. Going down to the mines was actually a lot scarier than I thought, especially when you turn all your headlights off and you can hear the explosions going off in the distance within the mines ... heard too many mining disaster stories recently I think. Scaling through the mines was also more difficult than I expected, they haven't exactly dug out perfect wee tunnels to crawl through - a lot of interesting scaling interesting areas was necessary! We certainly didn't go much further than the original tour, a little deeper was offered but - nobody was really all that keen. The miners in here all work so amazingly hard in the heat down there, I felt really bad for constantly getting in their way and thought about how hard it must be to just get on with your day with a constant stream of annoying tourists messing it up and wanting to look at what you're doing. We did however take them some cocoa leaves and the alcohol they drink - 96%, they actually drink it, completely outrageous - it is literally turps.