Erik Trinidad and The Bolivian Temple of Doom

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DAY 94: Potosi isn’t just the world’s highest city; at one point in history it used to be the richest city in Latin America.  Its wealth came from the abundance of silver discovered in the Cerro Rico, the big mountain overlooking the town.  Mines were created in the 1500’s to extract the silver and other valuable metals, to process them and export them.  Back in the day, many of the people in the mine worked as slaves that lived under poor conditions, including children—much like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the 1984 Steven Spielberg classic where Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) encounters a secret Thuggee cult financially supported by underground mines.

I embraced the notion of adventuring like Indiana Jones into the mines when I signed up for a tour, but with my Asian-looking features and my vintage New York Yankees hat, I looked more like his sidekick Short Round.  My hopes of traveling in the likeness of Short Round tanked when my guide Alfredo led me and my group to a changing house where we put on rubber boots, helmets, bright yellow pants and pullovers.  Rob, a 22-year-old from Scotland, said we looked like The Village People—I thought to myself, “Oh no, not more references to the Village People!”—so I tried to convince them that we looked more like The Beastie Boys in their “Intergalactic” video.

Also in my group was Steve, Rob’s friend and traveling companion in their four-month journey through South America, and Simon, a nice German guy traveling solo.  We hopped in a jeep with our new uniforms on, and then Alfredo and the driver took us to the miner’s market for gifts and supplies.

IT IS CUSTOMARY WHEN VISITING THE MINES to bring gifts to the workers.  The most common gifts are a bag of coca leaves, a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of this liquor they drink with 96% alcohol in it—it evaporates off your tongue as soon as it hits it—but one additional option was to bring explosives.  We were a group of four boys—“explosives” was the magic word.

Alfredo took us to an explosives store, which looked like any other hardware store.  Collectively we bought four explosion kits—three for gifts, one to blow up—each with a stick of dynamite, a fuse and some extra combustible material for extra BANG!  Alfredo cracked open a dynamite stick to show us the nitroglycerin inside—it looked like a big hunk of wasabi and I was careful not to get too much all over my hands.

WITH STICKS OF DYNAMITE IN OUR HANDS, we rode up the Cerro Rico along a winding dusty road.  Rob tried chewing some coca leaves while Steve put his stick of dynamite between his legs for a photo.  “This one goes up on the wall.”

We stopped at an ore processing area, where women sat in sections to literally sort through the rubble.  A woman gave us a demonstration of the different ores—zinc, copper, silver to name a few—and we gave her a bag of coca leaves for her troubles.  Then went on our way up to the top of the mountain to “blow shit up.”

Alfredo unwrapped one of the sticks of dynamite and remolded the wasabi-looking nitroglycerin for extra oompf.  With a sadistic smile, he attached a fuse to the wad and inserted the wad into a plastic bag with the extra combustible material.  He tied it up tightly to form the bomb—which we all happily posed for pictures with. 

Our guide took the bomb a way down the hill to an open area for the “explosives demonstration.” He lit the three minute fuse and walked back up to us as we patiently waited in anticipation for the bomb to go off.  (This is a 34 sec. QuickTime Movie file.) Needless to say, the demonstration went off with a bang.

NEAR THE ENTRANCE TO THE MINE, Alfredo mixed water and calcium carbonite into little canisters, which we hooked around our belts like Batman.  The chemical reaction of the two produced a flammable stream of gas that went up a tube and to the lamps in our helmets, like a propane torch.  The four of us were joined by three Bolivian tourists from Santa Cruz from the same tour company, and like seven dwarfs in yellow suits and flames on our heads, we ventured into the mine.

IN INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, the Thuggee cult worshiped the deity Kali, whom they pledged their devotion to with an offering of flesh and blood.  In this Bolivian “temple of doom,” the miners worshiped a similar deity that was a little more down to earth; they called him “Tio Jorge” (Uncle George) and instead of human sacrifice, they offered him coca leaves, liquor and cigarettes.  We paid our respects to Uncle George, spread some coca leaves in his lap, lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth, and poured him some of the liquor we bought—plus some on the floor “for his homies.” With a blessing from Uncle George, we went off into the mines. 

THE POTOSI MINES, NOW PRIVATIZED, ARE NO LONGER operated with a state of slavery.  The mines are now “cooperative mines,” in which workers voluntarily put in hard hours per day to gather materials to split between himself and a smelter.  The conditions however, haven’t changed; according to Lonely Planet, miners usually die of silicosis pneumonia within ten years of daily work from all the noxious materials in the air.  Some tunnels have poisonous chemical reactions on them; others had fibers of pure asbestos.

The seven of us made our way through the claustrophobic underground passages—it was like being in a human-sized ant colony.  We made our way down into little holes, through low and narrow crawlspaces (picture above), over pits with planks of wood and up ladders with rungs three feet apart from each other.  Some ladders had broken rungs and we had to be careful not to fall.  At times the flame in our torches would go out and we needed to “kiss” another helmet for a light.  There was a span of time when the stream of gas coming from my waist canister was weak and I needed to be “kissed” every twenty seconds.

Like the good guys in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, we helped out the miners as they went away with hammers, picks and for some, pile-drivers.  Since they were all in the mine on their own free will, there was no need to free them like the children in the Spielburg movie—instead we just gave them cigarettes, liquor, coca leaves and sticks of dynamite.  I’m sure the workers appreciated the explosives; at one point, we felt the vibrations of an explosion above us.  Well, boys will be boys.

The boys in our group continued to be boys.  Using the flames from their head torches, Steve and Rob wrote their names in the rocky walls.  Rob even drew a nice big picture of Uncle George in the passageway where men with wheelbarrows went back and forth. 

OUR GROUP OF SEVEN SPLIT UP and it was just the four of us who followed Alfredo down a small rabbit hole, which had to be crawled through backwards.  The tunnels led out to an area with a big gaping hole that went down about two stories.  One by one, we made our way down it with the help of a rope dangling from somewhere up in the darkness.  As I reached for the rope, the flame in my helmet came in direct contact with my left hand—which ultimately left me with yet another scar on my global trip thus far.  I grabbed the rope with both hands to rappel down the chasm, but my foot slipped on a rock and I swung to the far side of the hole, holding the rope for dear life the whole time with my injured hand.  Eventually I got my bearing and made my way down into the empty, deserted tunnel underneath.

Our guide Alfredo suddenly started feeling dizzy, which wasn’t such a good thing when he was the only one that knew the way out of the underground maze of claustrophobia and hazardous materials.  He took a swig of water and ventured on.  We followed him through the narrowness of the mines to a fork in the tube.  He made a left, which took us to the light at the end of the tunnel.  If he had gone right like Indiana Jones and Short Round had done in the movie, we might have gone on an exciting mine cart chase, but after inhaling God-knows-what for hours, it was just good to be out in the fresh air.

THE REST OF THE DAY wasn’t nearly as exciting.  I wandered around town, ate some food and bought some bootleg CDs to listen to while working on the freelance design work I had.  I took many short breaks from my work to record, watch and re-watch the explosion video from earlier in the day.  Watching the big boom from the nitroglycerin didn’t seem to get tired—it’s no wonder the miners don’t mind working in their conditions; they get to play with dynamite everyday.


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This blog entry about the events of Wednesday, January 21, 2004 was originally posted on January 22, 2004 on the blog, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World (Or Until Money Runs Out, Whichever Comes First)," hosted by BootsnAll.com. It is one of over 500 entries that chronicled a trip around the world from October 2003 to March 2005, encompassing travel through thirty-seven countries in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. It was this blog that "started it all," where Erik evolved and honed his style of travel blogging. (It starts to come into focus around the time he arrives in Africa.)

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