Some Quick Bolivia Observations

There are Quechua and Aymara women everywhere in serious black bowler hats and big skirts and colorful blankets slung over shoulders carrying huge heavy loads or babies or both... Narrow winding cobblestone streets at 14,000+ feet and stinky microbuses and crowds of people jostling each other and selling pirated DVDs and fruit and bread and everything else on the 2ft wide sidewalks and spilling out into the streets and not a single traffic light functioning in the entire city... Shoeshine boys every 100 yards eager to polish my boots even though I just got them polished yesterday and they're totally spotless and shiny and I don't think I have the patience to get a shoeshine once a day...

Bitter taste of coca leaves chewed up into a ball in my cheek with a little bite of "bica" -bicarbonate - to catalyze it and my mouth got a little numb but that's about it, although maybe it helped with the altitude I can't really tell... Paid 80 bolivianos about 9 dollars for a tour of the Cerro Rico mine above town, which is double the daily wage of the miners who work there every day in the dark in the worst conditions I've ever seen, breathing toxic fumes, covered in mud, handling noisy heavy drilling machinery and dynamite and sickly-sweet-smelling ammonium nitrate to blow holes in the swiss cheese mountain that's been worked over and over again continuously since 1545, where they say that over 8 million slaves and workers have died pulling out bucket upon bucket of zinc-slver-tin-lead ore to be broken up by hand in big piles at the mouth of the mine outside in the bright sunlight... sweating and feeling scared but adrenaline-rushed climbing down rickety wooden ladders through shaftways barely wide enough for my shoulders 150 feet down into a tunnel filled with ankle deep chemical water and turning off the headlamp to total and utter darkness and wandering into the shrine to El Tio de las Minas, the devil-god patron of the miners, whose giant phallus and horns are surrounded by offerings of alcohol and cigarettes and coca leaves... and taking a hot shower in my comfy hostel room at the end of the day and reeling from the physical, emotional, intellectual intensity of what I had experienced, and struggling to imagine how the miners cleaned up at the end of the day and what they ate for dinner and how they managed to get out of bed this morning, every morning, and go back to work there in the dark...

And changing my travel plans tonight because the only route from Potosí to La Paz is blocked by campesino protesters angry with their corrupt mayor and using the only tactic they have at their disposal, a roadblock, to get attention and force change, so I have to go instead to Cochabamba 20 hrs out of my way in order to get over to La Paz this weekend... thinking about the strategy choices and tactics people use here and how different they are from the ways in which we organize protests in the States...

Lots more to say on this and much else, but gotta run to go confirm my seat for another glorious overnight bus departing in several hours... and PS, internet connection too slow for uploading photos today, but more to come soon, including some lovely self portraits in baggy mine tourism outfit with extra large pants on backwards and inside out!