Potosí
(Bring your own oxygen.)
Leaving Sucre for Potosí--well, first you have to get out of Sucre. My cab driver and I swapped English and Spanish expressions as we drove a long way through more modern parts of the city to the bus station and my first lessons in South American bus travel. (Cab: about $6. A second class ticket to Potosí was about $8.) Second class meant a reserved seat in the upper level. South American buses are pretty nice. There were coffee machines upstairs on some buses. Downstairs were the driver's area, the conductor's office, washroom, and the really nice fully reclining seats.
Leaving the city I saw lots of people along the road doing their spring planting, including one using an ox. The road goes up and the landscape gets more arid. The trip to Potosí is roughly a right angle, but with lots and lots of curves, switchbacks and cliff hangers. All along the road are ruins of stone and adobe buildings; I couldn´t guess how old they were. As we got higher there were little settlements of stone and adobe buildings with stone walls.
Have you had the experience of going up and up in the mountains until suddenly there are no more mountains around and you realise
you're at the top? It´s a strange feeling to suddenly be on a high plateau. More surprising was the appearance of farms in this dry, rocky environment. There were settlements, schools, gas stations, but the only real town along the way was Betanzos (home of the biennial National Day of the Potato.)
Leaving the city I saw lots of people along the road doing their spring planting, including one using an ox. The road goes up and the landscape gets more arid. The trip to Potosí is roughly a right angle, but with lots and lots of curves, switchbacks and cliff hangers. All along the road are ruins of stone and adobe buildings; I couldn´t guess how old they were. As we got higher there were little settlements of stone and adobe buildings with stone walls.
Have you had the experience of going up and up in the mountains until suddenly there are no more mountains around and you realise
you're at the top? It´s a strange feeling to suddenly be on a high plateau. More surprising was the appearance of farms in this dry, rocky environment. There were settlements, schools, gas stations, but the only real town along the way was Betanzos (home of the biennial National Day of the Potato.)
Potosí´s population of 175,000 makes it the eighth largest city in the country. It's an old city (1545), once the richest city in the world, and still the highest at 3900 metres. Hence the lack of oxygen. By tropical standards it is cold in the winter with strong winds. In fact....
...after this noon concert on a plaza by Gato Flaco (Skinny Cat) Blues Band...
The weather changed abruptly and it snowed on us. Then sleeted. Then rained.
I sat in the plaza for some time watching people. It was lunch time and there were lots of kids in the uniforms of a number of schools. There were also German tourists. My unscientific observation was that most of the foreign tourists in Bolivia were German and French.
Rising on the edge of the city is Cerro Rica, the centre of the silver mining that made Spain rich. Large scale mining is a thing of the past, but there are still miners working there in deplorable conditions. The life expectancy of a miner is 10-15 years. You can take tours of the mines, but that had no interest at all for me.
A number of the streets are now for pedestrians only, and there are a number of shops where artisans sell their work through co-ops. Mostly it's clothing of alpaca.
Bolivia is also a bastion of small business. The streets are lined with very small shops, and even people working on the sidewalks at things like sewing. Not to mention the vendors of home-made saltenas. One thing I kept seeing was signs on shops offering photocopying. There were also lots of small shops and sidewalk stalls selling candy and Coca-Cola. Since you can't drink the tapwater, pop and bottled water are big sellers.
I bought some things from these guys....and some fruit at the city market, which isn´t the most appetising place I've been.
The Mint museum takes up a block. This is the back, and is pretty typical of the architecture in Potosí.
I rented through Airbnb from a young woman named Veronica, who didn't live on site. Her Mom--I don't know her name--helped me with arranging a cab and bus when I left. She spoke no English, so we communicated by me using our phones and by phoning Veronica to be our translator. When I took her picture was the only time she wasn't smiling.
We shared a courtyard with yet another part of St. Francis Xavier University.
Wouldn´t this be a great place to film a spaghetti western? Next stop: Uyuni.