Due to the day's delay in leaving La Paz, our stop in Potosi was to be a flying one.

At around 4,000m the city claims to be the highest in the world. It also used to be one of the richest thanks to its silver mines and so, surprise surprise, the centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Arriving at 6am we had a quick wander around the centre (very beautiful) and grabbed breakfast. We then did what everyone comes to Potosi for and booked ourselves onto a tour of the mines.

The mines were officially shut by the government in 1995 but the miners organised themselves and reopened them. Their lack of funds means the mines are now operated pretty much in the style that they would have been 100 years ago.

The tours are designed to (supposedly) raise money for the miners and to give you a first hand experience of what it is like to work in those conditions. Guide books and blogs warn of crawling through cramped spaces at temperatures of 40+ degrees Celsius. I was dreading it.

We picked Big Deal Tours as they claim to be the only one owned and operated by ex-miners.

Our guide, Pedro, was engaging and very entertaining. He also drank 96% proof alcohol throughout the trip and chewed vast quantities of coca leaves. He wasn't all there.

At the beginning of the tour you are taken to a market and encouraged to buy gifts for the miners. Generally these amount to a bottle of orangeade and a bag of coca leaves. However another option is a stick of dynamite. A £1.50 bargain. Pedro demonstrated how safe this is by chucking one on the ground in front of us. Soon we were all posing with them as cigars etc.

We then moved to a refining plant, which was essentially a rickety shed full of machines moving at great speed and chemicals splashing about all over the place. No guards rails and at points the floor was simply a few bits of plywood resting on beams. Two bits of overhead piping came apart right above our heads and started dripping an unidentified liquid. Health and safety are clearly of little concern here!

It being a Saturday the mine wasn't that busy with workers and so we were spared the soaring temperatures and noise levels, which was a blessing. We saw a few guys pushing carts of rock around, although I'm not convinced they weren't just a plant for our benefit. In any case it gave us an opportunity to hand out orangeade and coca leaves.

The mine lived up to expectation in terms of how it looked - kind of like where the dwarves work in Snow White. All wooden supports and rickety rail tracks. Only the cigarette butts and empty alcohol containers were cut from the Disney film.

Pedro's narrative primarily consisted of telling us that the miners are womanising drunks who can actually make a very decent living from the mine. I'm not sure how many of them do. The death rate is around one a month, and life expectancy is mid fifties at best.

Most disturbing was El Tio, a kind of demon that the miners rely on for luck and good fortune - by offering cigarettes, coca leaves and alcohol of course. However, the physical representation of this demon, allegedly made by a one armed miner, was the really disturbing thing. A naked devil-like being in full state of extremely generous arousal. Sitting around 'that' whilst being informed of miner folklore was somewhat distracting!

As we gratefully emerged back into daylight we pointed out that we hadn't donated the sticks of dynamite that we had bought. No worries, Pedro and the other guide decided to show us the stuff in action. First one of our group had to mould the stick into a ball, then after Pedro had added a boosting agent, a fuse and lit the fuse, the resulting bomb was handed round. Yes, dynamite with a lit fuse was handed around the group! Don't remember that from my visit to the Big Pit in Wales. The other guide then ran with the device to a hopefully safe distance - and began prancing around doing sit ups etc while the fuse burned down. At just the right time he ran for it, and BOOM. No question of the authenticity of the stuff!

Having survived all this unscathed, we had lunch with the group (llama meat for the first time - bland) and headed to the bus station for our bus to Sucre. We just missed one bus by seconds, and then what we shall politely call a misunderstanding over timetables (i.e. printed and displayed timetables mean nothing) meant we had to wait 90 mins for the next one. And then that one tried to leave 5 mins early from the wrong bay and so we had to run after it to get on. But we got there in the end.

Arriving in Sucre, the administrative capital of Bolivia, we checked into our thankfully very nice hostel and hit the town. Great steak followed by a couple of beers in one of the bars near the main square. The nightlife is very decent indeed, some really cool bars. Plus of course the colonial city centre is beautiful.....