Uyuni To Potosi And The Mine

Finishing at Uyuni having seen the salar and camped out we headed away with a completed task.

The road handed to us a stark contrast to the incoming, we had beautiful flat smooth tarseal all the way, not a bad change after clobbering sandpits and corrugations.

Given we had no rush we decided to kick around for a couple of days in Potosi, it seemed like a nice place and it was.

Finding a hostel was easy, within ten minutes we had an ok place that was quiet and moto parking, no wifi but plenty in town, we feel we are getting a bit boring now with no Police required to calm down unusual owners. .. hard to find a good pub scrap these days

Finding the local market allowed us to home cook again, it would be cheaper just to eat out but we find it better to eat in as you have control over our intake and get what we want.

Typical town with small streets



Potosi is a nice place, slightly touristy but has good services, the main attraction of course being the mine and yes you can buy dynamite off the shelf to take home and blow shit up with, for me I resisted as me and dynamite could end up doing damage .. particularly useful if we headed back to the “ex” hotel in Uyuni.

Upshot is we resisted and simply took the mine tour which was excellent and to be fair very hard work just climbing around in there let alone working 12 hours per day.

All the crash gear



Me set up, the truck to the left was the only vehicle they would let me drive



Even for short people it gets tight



Each miner can find his own silver seam, if the seam turns out to be a dud then that is the way it is, if it turns out to be a boomer he turns up in a Hummer.

This guys working space, step, tight and loose



The conditions these guys work in is unreal and bloody hard to any standard, there are many deaths ever year for experienced miners falling down shafts and having rock falls come down on them.



And yes some had secretary's too



Getting tighter



....and tighter, too much lunch and you will not fit!!!



Back out to daylight and the mine entrance



Back into Potosi centro we took a look around, we found this amusing, she was fast asleep against the pole with cars roaring past her only a meter away....I guess when ya gotta sleep ya gotta sleep.



We also celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary there, a Canadian family staying at our hotsel made a curry for us and we joined in for a good feast, TMK providing the all important Bacardi Mojeto grog to soften the night .... good times.