¡Hola!

After leaving Cochabamba I flew south down to Sucre, the judicial capital of Bolivia, to soak up some of the convivial colonial atmosphere.The city is definitely one of Bolivia's prettiest, with very well-kept streets full of colonial buildings and a grand main plaza reminiscent of that of Cuenca in Ecuador.I climbed up the hill to the Mirador café to enjoy a great view of the city over lunch and then bought some Sucre's famous Para Tí chocolates to graze on whilst catching up on my blog in my very indulgent en-suite room.In the evening I caught up with an Irish guy called Eoghan, who had jumped into my taxi earlier, and went to a really top-end steak restaurant called Taverne to indulge even more.We spent the rest of the night getting drunk in a gringo bar in town and decided to head to Potosí together in the morning.

Potosí, three hours from Sucre, is another pretty place.It is the highest city in the world at 4100m and was once also the richest city in the world, bankrolling the Spanish economy for over a century thanks to an abundant supply of silver ore deep inside the monolithic mountain, Cerro Rico, towering over the city.The mines are still operational today, and miners work for themselves in small groups, or cooperatives, eaking out a living extracting the remaining measly pickings of lead and zinc left in the mountain.Eoghan and I went to visit the mines on one of the infamous tours, where we were first taken to buy gifts of coca leaves, soda drinks and dynamite for the miners before getting kitted-up and heading inside.The conditions in the mine are horrendous, with tiny confined spaces, dust and poisonous gases, but many of the miners we met had been working there for over 20 years, some since they were about 15 years old.Needless to say most of them die prematurely of various horrible respiratory diseases, and even after just two hours in the mines we were all coughing up dust and feeling generally like death.I chewed coca constantly whilst underground, which helped a lot, but combination of the coca and the dust made my mouth go black - nice.

There are essentially no modern tools or equipment used in the mines, simply because they are too expensive to buy, and so everything is done with hammers, chisels, spades, buckets and, of course, dynamite. We met one old guy who was slowly hammering out a hole ready for a stick of dynamite, about 20 inches deep, which he said would take him about three days to complete!The excavated rock was shovelled into baskets and then poured down chutes into Indiana Jones-style carts on narrow gauge tracks weaving through the tunnels in the mine; we had to dive out of the way of them from time to time with little warning.After leaving the mine we chopped up some dynamite that we had bought (for about two quid) and put together some makeshift bombs using bags of ammonium nitrate powder and fuses.If that wasn't crazy enough, we then proceeded to have pictures taken (very quickly) of each of us holding these bombs with the fuse lit.It has taken me until now to realise just how preposterous this was, but at the time it seemed like just part of the tour... this is Bolivia after all.After taking the photos a few of the miners then ran down the road with the bombs and planted them on the side of a hill.I have a video of the four of them going off (with considerably more power than I was expecting), which I have uploaded.

After a few hours in Potosí's space-age terminal listening to the hypnotic chorus of the boleteríagirls shouting out their various destinations, I took an overnight bus to La Paz.Ten hours, and four valium tablets, later I arrived refreshed in the de facto capital (for the fourth time) ready to climb the mighty Huayna Potosí mountain.

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