The Salt Flats

After the jungle trek, and a day of hard-core downhill mountain biking (which I'm not going to blog about because I don't have the pictures), we headed South towards Argentina. But before we hit the border, we stopped for a tour of Bolivia's huge Salt Flats and a 500 year old silver mine.

The Salt Flats are something like 16,000 square kilometres of pure salty ground. There's no plant or animal life, and only blinding white landscape as far as the eye can see. Its a pretty surreal landscape.

The tour also took us into some very high altitude mountains (12,000 feet) with a desert landscape,  evidence of volcanic activity, red lakes, fumerols, and flamingos. At night we stayed in hotels made out of salt. I was slightly worried a little rain could put a hole right through our salt shelters, but apparently it doesn't rain there too often.

We were also blessed with a fellow tourist who likes to play hearts (card game) which added some excitement to James' Jordans' and my almost daily game of cards.

Our last stop in Bolivia was in a Spanish-built colonial town called Potosi. It was quite a nice place (Unesco listed), with Spanish style buildings and churches and narrow cobblestone streets.

Our main reason for visiting Potosi was to see the silver mines that we heard have enslaved millions of Indigenous Bolivians for hundreds of years. Thankfully that has ended and the mines have run out of silver, but they are still used for mining zinc and other minerals. And the mines are still quite dangerous; around 15 people die working there every year.

 

The mines are really narrow, dusty, and are big. There are about 12 stories of tunnels stacked on top of each other that are connected by a few "elevator" shafts. We brought coca leaves, pop, and other gifts for the miners which they seemed quite appreciative of. The work conditions are challenging, but the miners are paid a high salary by Bolivian standards: about $10 Canadian per day.

At the end of the tour we made a stop at the miner's god, "El Diablo", who they honour with gifts to provide them with good luck and safety.

Currently we're in Argentina's second largest city, Cordoba, but tonight we're taking a bus to Buenos Aires. I'm hoping to take in a football match, and maybe rugby and polo as well.