To the Center of the Known World
Tupiza was a decent one day excursion to a two horse town. Some people fall in love with the locale, but we planned an early exit instead. Transportation in Bolivia is either by bus (reasonable in price and speed), train (reasonable in price and who knows when the strike riddled system will deliver), or personal taxi (expensive but fast). We chose the bus to Potosi, complete with "state of the art" spider web windshield cracks.
Busing Bolivia demands flexibility as well. Who knows who or what will be sharing this mode of transport... maybe even a shipment of complete stocks of maize?
Speaking of corn, the bio-scape of under-developed South American countries has not be congenial to my digestive track or my flora has been too amicable to microbial intruders. Either way, the last 16 hours of chills and sweats left me craving a simple meal of soup and corn. This is not your average sweet corn but chalky yellow starch nuggets. The simplicity helped to steady things.
It's got to be good... because if Granny was eating it, then its all good. She was my tennis shoe wearing culinary inspiration.
Ah, Potosi, the center of life on the planet 500 years ago. Did you know that in those colonial times Potosi, Bolivia was the wealthiest and largest city on the planet? London and Paris paled in comparison on both accounts. The reason being, that Potosi held the largest known silver reserves in the world. The Spanish held hundreds of thousands of native workers in slave or conscript conditions to feed the wealth of the Empire. As a result Potosi grew to mammoth economic and human proportions.
What remains is a crumbling framework of opulence. The colonial structures are a withering reminder of former greatness. Just as the silver veins have been exhausted and the mines left to native generations, so the former estates and government buildings have followed suite.
Classic Spanish design elements still linger through the old town, in spite modern threshold improvements.
The orange building to the left is our hostel, which seems to be in the very shadow of the Potosi mountain. It is not a beautiful mountain, but a creepy pyramid of foreboding presence. Over 8 million miners have died inside since tunneling began around five hundred years ago. It is said that, "This mountain eats men."
From the roof-deck of the hostel, we could be looking out over any number of clay tile roofed Spanish towns, but instead it is not hard to be reminded that we are in one of the poorest countries in South America.
All it takes is a peek out of the port hole bathroom window towards the mines, noticing the neighborhoods descend in poverty order toward the overwhelming plight of abject want. This is a very odd city of great former beauty, tremendous impoverishment and stolen wealth, that dazzles and deadens it successive moments.
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