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Today we are starting the new year. As usual this is accompanied with a bit of hangover and we chose o spend the day sleeping late and relaxing at the hostel and walk around town. The last week we have been seeing very different sites.
The 26th we went to see Tiwanaku which is a ruined city near La Paz. It used to be tha capital of a great Andean civilization for a thousand years, before climate changes caused their agricultural system to collapse. The survivors of the Tiwanaku civilization subsequently moved north to found the Inca civilization in the Cusco valley. It was impressive to see the ancient masonry and the finely carved monoliths and Sun Gates.
The next day we took the night bus down to Sucre where the min attraction was the worlds biggest collection of dinosaur footprints. The digging of a local cement factory had uncovered a large vertical cliff wall which was covered with 5500 dinosaur footprints belonging to many different species. It was amazing to see all the prints which had all been made during one day 68 million years ago. Back then the cliff wall had been the muddy bank of an inland sea. This later dried up and the continental drift pushed up the Andes mountains changing the flat beach into a vertical cliff wall.
The next day we took a midday bus to the mining city of Potosi. Potosi is the highest city in the world located at about 4100 m above sea level. Today it is a relatively small city of about 100.000 people but in its prime at the end of the sixtenth century it was by far the biggest city in the americas and with 200.000 inhabitants bigger than both London and Paris. Potosi owes its exixtence to Cerro Ricco (the rich mountain) which is a pyramid shaped mountain overlooking the city and which was simply the riches silver deposit which has ever been found. The mines of Potosi was the source of half of the silver that Spain imported from the Americas during their whole colonial period. However, the silver mining came at a great cost to the native population which wee used as slaves in the mines and it is estimated that up to 9 million native and African slaves died in the mines. On the 30th of December we took a tour to see one of the mines and it was an extremely interesting but also scary experience to crawl through the dark corridors, sometimes on hand and knees, while seeing the working conditions of the miners. The mines were still in operation through many of the working methods had changed little since the colonial times. The main changes was that electric headlamps had replaced candles and dynamite had replaced gunpowder, but the heavy mining carts were still pushed by hand, some miners still drilled the holes for dynamite using hammers and boys down to 14 years old still worked in the mines. The miners did not use any masks to protect them against the dust and so their lungs would be destroyed after maximum 40 years of work. The death rate from accidents was about 0.4% per year. Our trip also included a trip to the miners market wherre we bought dynamite for he miners and for a few demonstrative explosions after the tour.
Yesterday we took a local bus out to some local hot springs and spend a few hours relaxing in the sun at the side of a small lake, whose waters were about 30 degrees warm. The landscape of the Altiplano on the way to and around the lake was simply amazing with fantastically coloured cliffs eroded into the most amazing shapes. In the afternoon we came back to La Paz to do shopping before we joined a big group of people at our hostel where we cooked a big dinner and partied untill 12 o´clock when we went down to the main square and continued to check out the discos of the city.
Tomorrow we plan to take a morning bus to Uyuni where we will go on a three day tour of the Uyuni salt flats, which at 9000 sq. km. is the biggest salt flats in the world and should be the most spectacular sight in Bolivia. We will end the tour by going to San Pedro del Atacama in Chile to sepnd a few days seeing the sights of the Atacama, the worlds driest desert before returning up to La Paz.
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