These past few days have been spent mainly travelling to new towns and exploring. I am in Potosi right now, a colinial mining town. Yesterday I visited the silver mine and had a tour, which included lighting dynamite and scrabbling behing a boulder to hear the explosion. I also met a few miners, one of whom was only 14 years old. Men work in the mines from 12 years old, and shadow their fathers until they are experienced enough to work alone. Women do not work in the mine, as the ´Pacha Mama´who is the goddess of the mine, gets jealous!
After the mine visit, the hostel owner told me about ´Corpus Christi´which is happening today in Potosi. To celebrate, the local people go out the night before (last night) and eat sweet pastries which apparently represent the body of christ. I was just happy to eat the pastries as they were delicious! Whilst wandering around the market, my trousers suddenly felt very wet. My friend checked and someone had poured strawberry milkshake all down the back of my legs. A local woman was trying to ´help´ me clean the milkshake off, but this is a well known scam (spilling something on a tourist, helping them to clean it off whist robbing them in the confusion) so my friend and I ran back to the hostel, as fast as the altitude would let us! Thankfully, I never walk around with anything other than the equivalent of a few pounds in cash but still, crisis averted!
I am about to leave for Uyuni at 1pm (its 12.23pm) so that´s enough for now but I will post photos over the weekend when I am back in La Paz. The internet is cripplingly slow here and uploading photos would probably shut the system down.
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