Day 336: Odyssey to Ushuaia

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

Day 164: Book Excerpt: On The Grand Trunk Road

On South Asian roads, where the chance of being accidentally blind-sided is high, horn-honking is an act of courtesy. Should it ever become an Olympic event, the Indians would have a leg up for technical prowess, but the Pakistanis, who like to wire snippets from Western popular songs into their steering columns, would score well for creativity. Once, stuck at the Khyber Pass, I listened to a Pakistani truck driver push his way through a traffic jam leading into Afghanistan by using a horn that played at deafening volume the refrain from Never on Sunday. Cars and trucks peeled out of his way just so they wouldn’t have to listen to the damned tune anymore.

Inside our spacious Tata cab, Singh kept his distance and projected a hard, lonely demeanor. He deferred to Vinod and myself and worried about our comfort. At the same time he bullied his assistant driver, a poor Bihari named Santosh, unmercifully. This seemed to reflect the unspoken hierarchy of our traveling party, with myself at the top by virtue of being a foreign guest, Vinod next by virtue of his Brahmin birth, which he advertised at every opportunity, then Singh, and at the bottom Santosh, who was of a caste similar to his boss’s but earned one tenth his salary and suffered in apprenticeship. Whether one chose to see this hierarchy in terms of old identities such as caste or new identities such as economic status, there was no denying its palpable presence inside our truck. Among my three companions, groveling deference from below and spiteful bullying from above seemed to be the guiding principles.

Hunched with hooded eyes over the steering wheel, Singh spoke laconically about his past. He said he was born as a Jat Sikh, an unruly subset of India’s minority Sikh religious group, whose male members traditionally wear turbans and never cut their hair. (Jats are a peasant farming caste group that can be either Sikh or Hindu.) On the small farm in rural Punjab where Singh grew up, his status was ordained by tradition but his opportunities were defined by modernity. His ancestors had been farmers and soldiers, but after dropping out of high school, he took to trucking because the money was good. Now he was independent, even upwardly mobile. He wore a shiny gold watch and said he sent one hundred rupees a month home to Punjab to his wife, whom he wed in an arranged marriage in 1984. Those he left behind in the village were trapped now in the Sikh separatist insurgency, in which more than five thousand people, mostly Sikhs, die in shootouts, bomb explosions, and police killings each year. In any event, apart from the war, farming bored him, Singh said. He preferred to be on the move. “I’ll drive until my body quits.”

Or until the road kills him. Daring and reckless behind the wheels of their massive vehicles, India’s truck drivers are modem heirs to the traders, conquerors, robbers, and religious seers who have traveled the Grand Trunk Road for centuries. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mauryan emperors laid the first tombstone-shaped mileage markers between Kabul and Calcutta. In some ways, not much has changed on the highway since then. As ever, the road is vividly dangerous. More than one thousand truck drivers, passengers, and pedestrians die in accidents along the highway each year. Its shoulders reveal an almost surreal display of wreckage: trucks lying smashed and upside down in ditches every thirty to thirty-five miles, buses wrapped around trees, vans hanging from bridges, cars squashed like bugs. Sections of the road are controlled by bandits who hijack trucks several times a month, sometimes killing the drivers. Corrupt policemen demand bribes at every checkpoint and throw drivers in jail if they don’t oblige. And in rural areas, if a cow or pedestrian is run over, mobs of villagers attack, burn trucks, and lynch drivers in revenge—a peril of which Bhajan Singh would twice be reminded on the road ahead.

In some ways, the Grand Trunk depicts what is unsettled and unfinished in South Asia. The road is the backbone of commerce in the northern subcontinent, and commerce is perhaps the most powerful force churning up change in the region these days—raising expectations, dashing expectations, rearranging old caste, class, political, and religious orders. V. S. Naipaul traveled around India recently and described what he saw and heard as “a million mutinies now.” At least half a million of them concern money.

We paid our first bribe almost immediately. An inspector waved us down and demanded tax papers. In India’s Nehruvian, “mixed socialist” economy, taxes on commercial goods are supposed to be paid by truckers at every state and city border. The system is partly a legacy of the old European feudal idea, carried abroad by the European colonialists, that whoever controls the road—bandit, prince, thug, foreign imperialist—takes his tribute. In India, the tax goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, the Nehruvian state has claimed authority but has shared its booty with the bandits and thugs, some of whom are in its employ, others of whom just rush in where the state has left a void. Modem truckers, like the traders of old, have adapted nicely to the system, foraging inexorably toward profit wherever it can be found. Since following the official rules and paying all the official taxes would bankrupt most transporters and bring commerce to a halt, the trucking companies have developed an intricate, shifting system of bribes paid to bureaucrats and police to keep the wheels turning. Private tribute has been substituted for public tribute. The Nehruvian state may be going broke as a consequence, but its employees and their allies are doing rather well.

~~On The Grand Trunk Road -by- Steve Coll