Potosi is a Bolivian city that has had a number of bylines since the Spanish found silver and settled there. Located at 4,060m above sea level it has claim on the highest city in the wolrd and at one stage most of Spain's silver was mined here, Spain's silver currency was minted here and it was known as the richest city in the world. Today its lost a lot of its former glory but it's still a mining town with manyBolivian miners still working the earth for lead, zinc, tin and silver. The scary (and kind of facinating) thing is that mining methods haven't changed much since early colonial days. I've often said for many years that the main problem with mining in the first world is lack of children and donkeys, lets just say the mining in Potosi are still humming even without the latter being employed...........

After spending the first evening in Potosi gasping for air as I walked around the street the next day saw me booked on a mining tour (which is once of the city's chief) tourist attractions. Sounds a lot like work for me but I had heard from other travellers that I had met that a visit to Potosi's mines was quiet an experience and was ready to go. Usually I don't describe tours blow-by-blow but I think with this trip its probably the best way to talk it through.

We got picked up from the hostel on a bus and first taken to a house in the mining neighbourhood to change. Equiped with overalls, gumboots (note no steal caps) we headed to the miners market to buy some presents to give to the miners that we'd encounter on our trip. The first interesting fact about the mines in Potosi is that they are not owned or operated by a single company but worked as a cooperative. Each miner is part of a team that works a section of the earth that they decide on (usually by following veins of mineralisation). They get paid by selling the earth they mine to processing companies based on tonnage and grade (though knowing how painful mine to mill reconcilliation is I'm sure they're getting ripped off on the sale). Anyway the miners market is where they buy there supplies for underground, PPE, softdrinks, coca leaves, alcohol (the seasoned miners drink a spirit of 96% alcohol while they work, at least the young ones only drink beer!!!!) and dynamite. We bought some softdrink, coca leaves and dynamite to keep the workers we met happy.

Next we headed to one of the processing plants to buy the ore from the miners. It was a delapidated house/shed, wondering through the front door we were confronted by a early 1900's ball mill about 1m in diameter (all of about 50kW) churning away on a variable trickle of s***ty looking rock and emitting a horriffic sound from its pinion bearing. While everyone was oohing and arring at the first mill they've seen our guide told us, much to my delite, it was a flotation plant (for those who don't know flotation is my speciality) that concentrates the lead-zinc and silver! Unfortunately in the next sentence he explained the process in a way that showed he was a true miner and really didn't understand the plant. The float banks were something out of a Victorian horror movie, a conglomerate of metal, wood, duct tape and dirt with all drives and pulley's unguarded and running (in my opinion) like s***e. The ore, obiviously a mixed oxide/sulphide (looked very similar to crap from Black Mountain upper adits) that most sensible mining operations try to avoid was performing pittifully in the float cells, it looked as if they didn't have enough blower capicity to get the bubbles through the pulp, they was insufficient frother (especially for heavy lead-silver minerals) and they bubles that did exist were very poorly loaded. I'll stop raving here as I tend to get a bit excited about bubbles and anyone not metallurgically inclined is probably getting bored. The concentrate dewatering was also quiet different with it sitting in large concrete tanks until it was deemed dry enough to pack. My old 'mates' Hannes and Trev would have loved this as maybe they could have introduced their 'solar-thermal drying technology' and looked impressive!!! I finally was allowed to touch the concentrate in the drying ponds (the guide told me the chemicals were too dangerous to touch coming off the float cells :) and I realised that the other reason the float was crap that there were particles of up to at least half a milimeter in there. I wonder could I do a profit sharing deal with me to improve their little plant? Employing munchkin's with microscopes and tweesers probably would have cut costs and improved efficiency! At the end of the process they packed the mixed concentrate into 50kg sacks and sent it overseas for sale. When our guide announced it was an excellent product that was in high demand it confirmed my suspicion that he had NFI and I then wondered who actually busy this s***e.....

The mine portal looked ominious. If Gollywood ever does a reallife remake of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves they could use this portal and the mine for there location. Ducking we turned on our cap-lamps and trampled over the rail tracks into the side of the hill. After a few hundred meters we entered a side adit that was used as a 'museum' for the mine, with desplays with a bit of history and a few dieties that the miners worshipped. Notibly there was this white fibrous material 'growing' all over the ceiling which was obiviously asbestos - perhaps this explains the short lifespan of the miners. Leaving the museum we tramped further into the hill, passing the ocasional crew of miners coming up at the end of their work period for the day. In sections of the main drive we could (mercifully) stand up straight however for much of it I was stooped, in some spots almost doubled over which made it hard to keep an eye on the ground above held up by supports that had been around since colonial times.

After another 10-15 minutes we reached the 'ramp' down to level two and three and began our decent. Ramp was a relative term, it was basically a twisting turning narrow passage (no more than 1meter x 1 meter at its widest points) that lead down through a maze of dodgy ground support. After about 10 minutes of crawling downward I decided that this was a bloody dangerous place to be. A hand of foot wrongly placed was going to bring down a ton of rubble (or even worse the roof) onto everyone in the passage. I've never been unconfortable underground either in mines or in caves but I was in this ramp. The guide managed to persuade me (despite my better judgement) to go on to the third level where there was some active mining going on.

The mining was amazing, the drilling was done by hammering a metal spike into the ground, the holes were then dynamited and then mucked by hand. Mine carts were filled by hand and then dragged/pushed by four miners to a hoisting heading where it was dumped and other miners shoveled it into baskets of 200kg each where it was hauled to surface - also by hand. The mining teams usually included fathers and sons who worked side by side, usually since the sons reached their early teens. I'm glad I wasn't born in Potosi!

After returning to the surface - easier said than done in a humid, narrow, dusty environment at over 4,000m in altitude our guide decided to set off some dynamite for us. Camly packing it then lighting a one minute fuse we all held a smoking live stick for photo ops. He then calmly ran the dynamite a hundred meters from the tour bus and hastlily beat a retreat.

Boom!