The next real stop on the agenda was Potosi, home of the famous mine the Spanish empire exploited to amass much of their wealth. The way to Potosi was long and hard. Getting there was an eye-opener. As we toured the mountain roads we often passed crosses spiked in corners where vehicles had driven off cliffs. Mourners had come and marked the spot where the victims had fallen to their deaths. We rounded one corner and saw a truck that had recently fallen, its blue carcass still undisturbed in its resting place. We dropped out of the higher mountain elevations and worked our way along terrible dirt roads through the Bolivian altiplano.
We all took rougher roads at different speeds, and were often separated because of it. During one such instance, a careless driver in an oncoming vehicle forced Peter off the road. As he struggled to maintain control, he ran down into a ditch. Peter somehow maintained the heavy bike’s balance, and forced it to veer back up toward the road. He hit a bump on the way up and finally slammed to an upright halt on top of the berm. Peter wasn’t thrown, but he was forcibly jarred forward when the bike stopped, and he slammed his testicles against the tank. After cursing and stomping around for a while, he calmed down and realized that the accident had caused an unusual oil leak on the Virgin Queen. A squashed oil line squirts only when the engine is under load, so at first, when the bike was stopped with the engine idling, he didn’t notice it. If he hadn’t stopped again later to inspect a bag lock that was also damaged in the crash, he might not have seen the oil that had splashed on the underside of the bike while he’d been riding. Looking for the source of this new development, he realized what was occurring and managed to temporarily patch it. If he hadn’t, he could’ve burned out his motor and ended his trip right there.
I’d gained a considerable lead, so I waited for the others to catch up. Santa soon came along, but Peter was still missing. After about twenty-five minutes I suggested we go back and look for him. Although we were often separated and went along at our own paces in the rougher stuff, we generally never let each other get too far apart. By the time we found Peter he seemed frazzled from the ordeal, but was otherwise OK. Luckily he’d met some guys in a Land Rover who gave him some extra oil, and his bike problem was temporarily resolved.
We eventually arrived in Potosi, winding up the road past a river the color of a steel sink, which painted the river rocks an industrial gray with mercury, lead, zinc, and other nasty elements. Beautiful craggy rock walls, red as blood, stood at attention along the road as we passed. Behind the city loomed the magnificent fountain of precious metals, the Cerro Rico, which gave the town of Potosi a reason to exist.
Every town in South America has the same names for hotels and streets. There must be a thousand Hotel Libertadors and hundreds of San Martín streets below the equator alone. While Robert and I wandered one of them, Peter worked on his broken oil line and his again-broken bag mounting system. The right side of Peter’s bag rack had by now been welded, reinforced, poorly painted, and rebroken a half-dozen times and looked absolutely repugnant. That bag mount had become an ugly wart on the Virgin Queen’s backside.
Then we were free to explore the phenomenon of Potosi and its famous mountain, Cerro Rico. In 1545 the Spaniards officially began exploiting its riches. Even before then the mountain was being eviscerated by the native peoples, including the Inca. For as long as those first miners have been at it, the mountain has been producing vast quantities of silver, tin, lead, antimony, and zinc. Over the course of the mountain’s generous life span, eight million workers are estimated to have died in the mines. Seven thousand people still work in them today. Such quantities of rock have been taken from the mountain that it’s shrunk—the Cerro Rico of Potosi used to be 17,000 feet above sea level. It now measures in at just over 15,800 feet. The mountain coughed up so much wealth for the empire that even today in Spain, to describe something of inestimable value, one can simply say “it’s a Potosi.”
Veins in the mountain run anywhere from a kilometer to ten meters long, and all run north to south. There used to be one-and-a-half to two-meter-thick veins of pure silver. Today there is little pure silver, but every two years or so, one of the seven thousand workers finds an untapped vein with enough wealth to allow him to retire for good. All the men work with the hope of being that miner. Until that day arrives, each rents space in the mine from the cooperative and hauls carts of rock and ore to the surface, where they keep 80 percent of the profits after the valuable minerals are separated. The 20 percent the cooperative takes goes to the state. Two weeks of work can yield eight to ten tons of mixed rock per miner, valued at roughly three hundred bolivianos, of which one-third is spent in supplies like dynamite and blasting caps for making new shafts, and alcohol for making life bearable.
The outcome isn’t totally bleak—if a miner is lucky enough to reach age fifty-five he can retire, after a lifetime of hunched-over toil in the mines, a hobbled, broken man. His reward will be thirty-five years of dynamite ringing in his ears, asbestos forming tubercles in his lungs, and a pittance of a social security check from the cooperative. But then again, most miners don’t retire.
Conditions have changed little in the blackness. Spanish stone archways, centuries old, still support some mine shafts, and many sealed tunnels contain the bodies of workers that weren’t worth being carried back out after their deaths. Engineers are unheard-of here. Apprentice learning dominates as knowledge is passed from father to son. Coca leaves are the diet of choice, and the sympathy of the devil is preferred when underground.
Miners pray to Jesus for protection when entering the mountain, but since Jesus only controls the heavens and land aboveground, they must pray to the devil for productivity below. They bring gifts for statues representing the evil angel, “the owner of the riches of the earth,” whom they affectionately refer to as El Tio—”the Uncle.” The miners make El Tio offerings of cigarettes, coca leaves, and the 95 percent pure alcohol firewater they drink, all in exchange for luck, the most precious mining commodity.
~~Odyssey to Ushuaia : A Motorcycling Adventure from New York to Tierra del Fuego -by- Andrés Carlstein
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