Planting Time

We are back! Well, most of the way anyway. We have been spending time in the midwest with friends and family. Our first stop after leaving Lima was the home of Larry and Gundula, dear friends from Holden Village. They were our gracious hosts for four days after our return in their home on Lake Erie. We shared so much laughter (right Gundula) during those evenings, and went on walks on the shore and through local parks during the day. You learn new things about people all the time ... this time we learned how interested those two are in wildflowers.

Now we are back outside of Berne, Indiana at Matt's folks farm. It is planting season, and Gregg is out in the fields all day from early in the morning until after dark. I'm feeling planted too.

Photo: Matt and Betty (his Mom) down the road from their farm. Amish buggy in background.

Vamos a Lima

Well the last few days of our time in South America are here. Today we fly from the altiplano down to Lima, on the coast. We did some thinking the other day and figured out that we´ve been at over 8,000 feet in elevation for 2/3 of this trip, and at over 12,000 ft for almost half of it. We are sort of wondering how we will react when we land this evening down at sea level Lima. Maybe we will be able to run for long distances without rest or something. However, given our general lack of exercise during this trip, that is unlikely.

Please keep reading this blog. We intend to update it even after we get back.

The beach in Lima:

Uyuni

We are back in La Paz now, after an amazing, if somewhat tiring trip through the Salar de Uyuni, and the national volcanic reserve. Our adventures were numerous ... we left from the cold, desolate town of Uyuni on Saturday morning in a 4WD vehicle containing us, a nice British guy named David and a delightful Norwegian family. We headed out into the salt flats ... an amazing expanse (over 100km wide in some places) of salt desert. At its edge the salar is only about 30 cm thick, but in the middle there can be over 100 meters of salt underfoot. There are islands of cactus and rock in this salt sea. We visited one on our way.

That night we stayed in a hostel composed completely of salt blocks, with a salt floor! Early the next morning we watched the sun rise over the desert and headed up into the very high mountains to see volcanos, rare endangered animals like the vacuña and the andean fox, and stranger things still. Such as a flocks of wild flamingos feeding in mineral lakes that slowly trun bright red or green during the course of the day due to the presence of micro-organisms in their water. Also ... Borax mines, bubbling hot springs and mud gysers, desolate volcanos, and the desert and rock formations that inpsired many of Salvador Dali´s paintings. At the extreme, we went all the way down into the desolate corner of the world where Argentina, Chile and Bolivia all meet (we even walked over the Chilean border a few yards!) ....

I´ll put some pictures of this part of our journey up, as words simply do not do the place justice. By the way, we almost didn´t make it out of Uyuni due to a confluence of events, including a power outage through the whole town, a mysteriously cancelled train, and a broken tourist bus. Thanks to strings pulled by the friendly Norwegians, we eventually got one of the few remaining bus tickets out of town that night, leaving behind an army of angry Israeli backpackers. Frozen Uyuni is not the place you really want to get stranded. Thankfully we were not, although the overnight bus trip was far from comfortable.

Tomorrow we go back to Peru and within a week we will be in Miami! We´ll see many of you soon.

MP

Potosi Underworld

I wish I could post photos right now, but like I posted last time, our beautiful card reader is MIA. In any case, we spent a couple of days in the historic city of Potosì, the source of most of the Spanish empire´s wealth in the new world. From the mountain named Cerro Rico which towers over the chilly city (it´s located at 4100 meters, that´s about 13,000 feet) the spanish, and now the Bolivians have extracted millions of tonnes of silver, lead, tin and zinc ore, which is processed in small local smelters and shipped all over the world.

In the old days, the silver in partuclar was fairly pure and relatively near the surface, and thus easy to extract and process. Since the 1800s, however, it has been necessary to delve deeper into the mountain to find anything of value. Now the mines are so spent and the work so hard that large companies have abandoned the mines altogether, and they are operated only by small cooperatives of miners. Matt and I went on a tour of one of these cooperative mines.

The first stop was the mercado minero, where we bought items to give to the miners as gifts (this is customary when visiting the mines.) The usual gifts are bags of coca leaves, cigarettes, bottles of pop and (I kid you not!) sticks of dynamite. All of these things (along with puro, a kind of everclear drink consisting of 96% pure alcohol) were available from various shops for a minimal cost (a stick of dynamite with detonator and bag of amonium nitrate costs $2.50.) Off to the mines we went. The tunnels were very small to begin with ... I had to duck my head and then crawl for the entire 2 hours we were underground. We did have helmets and protective suits. Deeper in the mine, the temperature increased to about 90 degrees and the air was thick with a fine dust consisting of fine silicate particles. Occasionally we would have to move to the side of the shaft to make way for a hand operated railcar full of ore on its way out of the mine. Soon we were deeper in the mine, and had to crawl for lack of space.

We met several miners. One man had been working down in the mine for over 24 years. He had 4 kids, and made about 50 bolivianos a day (about $6.70) Matt L talked to a 17 year old miner deep down in the mine who had been working all day at hand-hammering a dynamite shaft in the rock. He had to lay down on his stomach to fit in the small space in which he was working. We left the mine sort of stunned and shocked. On our way out we met 2 other miners who couldn`t have been more than 15 years old. Then there was a dynamite demonstration, and we were done.

The conditions under which these miners work are unbelievable. Many can only work for a few years before they are sickened by silicosis or cancer. I`ve never seen anything like it. Since the days of slavery and Spanish rule, it is estimated that over 8,000,000 people have died working the mines at Potosi.