Potosi, Bolivia.

Potosi. Quite the surprise - great town. Another colonial town, highest city in the world at 4000m (puff, pant, puff), and very pretty, churches, plazas, nice atmosphere, places for lunch (take that Cochabamba and Sucre) and genuinely lovely cosy pubs and restaurants. Photos of the town nestled below the mountains, the cathedral and a street (with me leaning against a streetlamp).
The reason it exists is the mine that we went to visit. It has been mined since 1540something, the Spaniards getting their hands on all the silver. The state stopped running the mine and now the local miners work it themselves, these days there's not alot of silver left and they extract a mixture of silver, zinc and lead.
So we dressed up as miners and went up to the hill - see photo of me with the hill in the background, apparently it used to be 1000m higher but over the 500 years of mining the constant excavations/cave-ins have reduced the height (I have yet to confirm this fact on google). First we went to ?refineries - where they take the raw rock and using flotation take off more pure ore. See photo of Karl in the obviously safety conscious factory. There are no smelters in Bolivia or neighbouring countries so it's exported and mostly smelted in Japan and China.
We stopped at the markets to buy supplies to give to miners - coca leaves, soft drinks (they don't eat during the day, you can surive on sugar and the effects of coca). You've got to wonder about the wisdom of selling pure (96%) alcohol, for drinking ("alcohol potable, buen gusto 96%"), for only 2 aussie dollars a litre in the same shop as you can buy dynamite (which, interestingly, smells of mustard/wasabi). In case you wondering, no. As far as I can gather nothing is illegal in Bolivia. So we bought some dynamite. Karl never thought he'd have to say as he got off a bus "I think that's my dynamite down the back seat". Our guide, thoughtfully, bought a teddy bear for us to blow up - see photo of Karl with teddy and evil thoughts.
Then we went down the mine! Very strange to be underground and yet at 4300m above see level (and appropriately breathless so having to suck in lungfulls of air that you can see in your headlamp is mostly powdered rock), what evil person came up with this combination? Photo of me scrambling down through the mine into some other hole that you can't see in the picture. We crouched (ceiling heights made for Bolivianos, not gringitos), we crawled, we slid, we rock-climbed but on the inside of the mountain, my fingernails will never again be clean, for hours after we came out my voice was hoarse from what i imagine was dust (or deadly gases) in my larynx. In the smaller shafts it's hot, the air is stale and dusty, apparently there are dangerous gases - aresenic etc. - we came across an area where someone must have set off an explosion and it smelled like caps from toy guns. I assume that's gunpowedery/explosivey stuff. There's no fancy lifts here - you walk in, there's no air supply, they take the rock out on railways by hand like in Victorian England. Photo of statue of "Dios" who is actually the devil. The devil rules underground so the minors provide gifts of cigarettes, coca leaves, wine, condoms (???) to keep him happy.
Photo of a miner at work. He's using a hammer and that chisel/pile to make a hole for dynamite - it's takes a couple of hours per hole. At the end of the day he'll use the holes he's made to blow up some of the rock. Then he'll move the rock out (by hand) and sell it to the processing factories. This guy is 32 years old and he's worked here for 22 years. No typo there. It's illegal for under 18s to work in the mine but it's not policed. The current youngest miner is 8. Our guide, now in his early 20s, worked in the mine from age 10 to 15. He earns less as a guide but it's healthier and could be tempted back to mining if comodity prices were to improve again. This miner is a jefe, he rents this section of mine and so takes all profits from what he finds. If he finds a good vein he'll employ other workers to mine it with him. A really good vein means you can maybe afford to bring in some machinery (powered by compressed air) to make those dynamite holes more quickly. The biggest groups would have maybe 20 miners and 4 jefes. The jefes pay tax so will get some social security benefits when they get sick/want to retire, the other workers don't bother. Miners work here because campesinos who don't speak Spanish or have an education can get work here and nowhere else. And because of family tradition. Our guide's father and grandfather are miners. His grandfather is dying now with silicosis but has reached the ripe old age of 68, very impressive for a miner. A couple of years ago about 14000 miners worked here, now it's about 8000 because of falling commodity prices. Miners have had to move abroad for work but would likely return if prices improved. Out of that 8000 there's a death rate of 40 - 50 a year (25 so far this year) due to accidents, mainly cave-ins.
And then we got to play with dynamite! The guide stuffed the dynamite down the teddy's throat with the fuse coming out his mouth. See photo of me with teddy with lighted fuse and slightly uncomfortably face (both me and teddy). And photo of explosion! Well, cloud of dust. The ground really vibrates/moves/shakes when it explodes! If you follow the dust cloud upwards there's a little circle of white smoke that i like to think is teddy's soul heading for a better place.