Hey!

Since I last wrote I´ve travelled to Sucre and on to Potosi, which is where I am now. I´m still on crutches but my foot seems to be slowly getting better and less painful so hopefully it´ll be back to normal by the time I leave South America!

Sucre is a really nice town. It´s officially the capital of Bolivia, although pretty much everything that is important can be found in La Paz. We got there the day before they celebrated their foundng day on the 25th. It was manic! We were woken pretty early by singing and gunshots. Then for the next few hours there was a constant procession of marching bands going past the hostel. On the day of the anniversary itself it was even more crazy! The president was in town, but no one likes him in Sucre as he wants to make La Paz the official capital city. There were more parades, this time with lots of military personal and cadets.

Sucre itself is really pretty. There´s a local law which says every building in the city has to be whitewashed once a year or something like that. It´s also famous for it´s chocolate, and rightly so! We tried a couple of samples and they were lovely, especially the rum ones!

From Sucre we visited the largest collection on dinosaur footprints in the world. They´re in a massive quarry, which is still in use. It was quite hard work walking to the top of the quarry to the visitor centre with crutches but it was worth it. They had massive models of some dinosaurs, a few of them life size. There was a good view point of the rock face on which the footprints could be seen. There were thousands of them. We had a really good guide who explained the different types and how they walked.

We then got a 3 hour bus to Potosi, the highest city in the world. Yesterday we went on a trip to the mines here. I couldn´t go down the mine itself but pain half price to do everything else. We visited the miners market, which is where they buy all their supplies like dynamite and hard hats. We got to try 96% alcohol which burnt so much! Aparently the miners use it as an offering to the mountain, alsong with llama sacrifices every week, to make up for taking the minerals.

We then visited a processing plant and got to see the way they separate the minerals from the dirt. They use floatation to separate them out and then spread the final product out in the sun to dry. Aparently it´s then shipped abroad where more complex processes are used to separate the silver from the zinc etc.

The miners only get paid depending on how much they produce and they quality of the ore they deliver to the plants. The mines are government owned and they don´t get paid just for working in them. Paul and the rest of the group then went down the mine but I had to stay above. Afterwards we got to blow up three sticks of dynamite on the hillside. The explosions were so loud!

Now we´re just having a quiet day in Potosi before getting a bus tomorrow to Uyuni to hopefully get a few days tour of the salt flats. Hopefully I´ll be able to do it ok on crutches!