Potosì

My timing for being in Sucre couldn't have been any more serendipitous. The city celebrated its bicentenial of independence for the entire month of May. There have been free concerts and parades all over the city. I got to see the Bolivian supergroup Kjarkas play a free concert. Noticably absent from the festivities is the Bolivian president Evo Morales who, despite his nation-wide popularity, is persona non grata in Sucre. The reason for this is that Sucre is, constitutionally, the capital of Bolivia but La Paz is where the center of the executive and legislative branches are. As anyone who has power is loath to let go of it, Sucre has been the site of various protests against Evo Morales, even blockading the airport runway and preventing his plane from landing in Sucre on one occasion. You can see signs scrawled in graffiti that say, "Sucre capital of Bolivia." I think Evo Morales knows that even showing up in Sucre would piss a lot of people off.
I ended up lingering in Sucre longer than I expected, partially because I am lazy and partially because I had an accident between myself and a car on the day I was leaving. I left the accident with only bruises to my pride and my body but my bicycle required a new wheel and I needed to get a new part machined for my saddlebags. I take at least partial blame for the accident as I was being a little too aggressive in challenging a yellow light. What I forgot was that, while the light changes from green to yellow and then to red, the other light changes from red to yellow and then to green. As these are old colonial streets, I thought I could easily beat the yellow light as I only had to cross a one-lane street. What I didn't anticipate, though, was that any driver a distance away from the intersection might try to anticipate the green light by accelerating on their yellow. This led to me slamming into the side of their car as I didn't see the car coming or have enough time to react in order to avoid the collision. I could tell the driver felt a little bit guilty himself for ,even though he stopped to check and see if I was alright, he was quickly gone. I am sure that I probably left a good sized dent in the side of his car as two hundred pounds of flesh, bones, steel, and rubber hurling into anything is sure to leave a mark. I might have even perforated the steel as my metal-spiked helmet impacted with the car first. I am now almost completely healed and my bike is in optimal condition. It didn't even cost me that much to buy a new wheel and machine a new part.
I am in Potosì now, site of the greatest theft of mineral wealth in the history of mankind. I have read before that Potosì supplied half of the worlds silver for over two centuries. The Spanish, ruled by the Habsburg dynasty during most of this time, mostly squandered this wealth on wars and luxury goods and were in decline by the end of the seventeenth century. The Cerro Rico, or rich hill, which looms over the south of the city has also swallowed literally millions of lives. Most of the estimates I have seen range from 4 to 8 million deaths. To put that in perspective the current population of Bolivia is around 9.1 million.
To be a miner in Potosì pretty much guaranteed, and still does guarantee, an early death. There are numerous ways that you can die in a mine: a tunnel can collapse, you can stumble upon noxious or explosive gas, you are exposed to many different toxins, and, if none of that kills you, than you will probably die from silicosis which is caused by the constant inhalation of microparticulate matter. Back when the mercury amalgamation technique for purifying silver was discovered, those who worked in refining the silver would mix the mercury and impure silver with their bare feet. They almost inevitably died from mercury poisoning afterwards. By the time Bolivia gained its independence from Spain, the silver in the mines had mostly run out. People still work, and die, in the mines of el Cerro Rico today, only they mine more tin and zinc instead of silver. This is a sad world we live in where people risk their lives for a pittance to feed the avaricious appetites of people on the other side of the world. If people ever wonder why I don't buy silver, gold, or any other kind of jewelery and I never will, this is why.

Leaving the Road of My Worst Nightmares

I am now resting in Sucre, Bolivia after riding on what was probably the worst dirt road that I have ever ridden on in my life. I will probably have nightmares about this road 20 years from now. There are many parts of the road with rocky, 30 degree inclines, some of which go on for miles at a time. Pretty much all of the switchbacks were at these inclines and also had loose dirt which added yet another layer of difficulty to this road. Sisyphus has it easy. The strange thing is that I actually preferred ascending over descending because I was afraid of damaging my bike. I have no doubt that this road has snapped car axles in half and destroyed transmissions. If I was lucky enough to ride on a flat part of the road I was pretty much guaranteed to be riding through a glorified sand pit. If there was a creek or river there was probably not a bridge. I suspect that the road is impassable during the rainy season. There was very little traffic and only a few towns where I could stock up on food and water and eat prepared meals. Most of the people who go from Oruro to Sucre take the longer, paved route via Potosì but I did not heed the warnings of those who told me that it was a bad road because I did not want to backtrack. I ended up needing just over a week to ride the 320 kilometers of dirt road between the town of Huanuni and Sucre.
The upside to riding on this road was that it was, indeed, beautiful. The mountains seem to painted every color that you can imagine a mountain would be. They are jagged and steep. I rode on many a mountain ridge with 1,000 foot dropoffs. The views were stunning. One night, when I was camping on the side of the road, I even got snowed on. The flurry only lasted about 30 or 40 minutes but left a pretty healthy blanket of snow on my bicyle, tent, and my surroundings. Despite the beauty of this part of Bolivia, I was happy to make it out of the wilderness as the road was definitely testing my morale. My bicycle is happy to be done with that road too and is due for a tune-up.
One casualty of the road was my G.P.S. device. I had already noticed that my G.P.S. wasn't accurately recording elevation gains when I was in Peru but I could live with that. I had also noticed that it would automatically shut off when I was going to down long descents. It took me a while to realize what was causing this problem. I would usually hit some kind of bump or pothole which would jolt the batteries loose for a microsecond and break the circuit therefore shutting it off. This was a manageable problem before but this road was so rocky that I decided it would be better to just turn it off and use it more sparingly. This means that I am no longer recording my total ascent or kilometers logged but I am saving a lot of batteries this way.
I was lucky or unlucky enough to witness something that few gringos ever get to see while passing through the towns on this road. I happened to pass through these towns during the festival called Tinku. Apparently, the townsfolk all get together and beat the shit out of each other but I didn't witness any of that. What I saw was everyone getting dressed up in traditional clothing and parading around town, rhythmically stomping their feet, and playing charangoes and sanpoñas. I was even awakened during the night one night while camping by people stomping through the countryside with their charangoes where I was camping.
The downside of Tinku is that it is pretty much an excuse, like most holidays in Latin America, for the men to get ridiculously drunk. In most of the towns I passed through, at least half of the male population was falling down drunk before noon. This created a volatile situation for me as I had to deal with pushy drunks trying to get me to drink with them in every town. In one town, a group of them even surrounded me when I was going up a hill and tried to get me to drink with them. I am damn near a teetotaler and particularly despise drunks so I politely declined to drink with them telling them that I was allergic to alcohol but they were unswayed by this argument and annoyingly persisted in trying to get me to drink. One of them was particularly belligerent and stole the sunglasses off of my bike before I was able to ride off. I then got off of my bike and politely but insistently asked for him to give me my glasses back. I knew that it was wise to pursue a diplomatic solution to this standoff rather than stab 5 or 6 drunk guys in the throat over sunglasses so I maintained this strategy until one of the more reasonable drunks intervened on my behalf. At this point I rode off and put as much distance between myself and the drunks as possible because I knew that once I was out of sight they would forget that I had even passed through.
One consequence of riding through the Incan nation, as I like to call the Bolivian, Ecuadoran, and Peruvian Andes, is that the iconic image of the masculine cowboy on a horse herding his cattle has now been indelibly replaced with that of an indigenous woman, wearing a bowler hat, following her cows around and cursing at them in Quechua when they don't move across the road fast enough. I have a similar image now for shepherds as well. When I hear, "The lord is my shepherd." I can't help but think of the little Incan lady cursing and throwing rocks at her sheep. I occasionally see a man with his cows or sheep but it is almost always a woman. God only knows where the men are. After Tinku, I am starting to think that they are off drinking somewhere.
I was cut off from the rest of the world during my week on the nightmare road because there was no internet access in most of the towns I passed through. When I finally got to Sucre, I wasn't shocked but I was nonetheless pissed off to find out that the scandal involving the Colombian army's deceiving and murdering of indigent people to pad the numbers of rebel kills they have has only grown. According to the B.B.C. there are now over a thousand cases pending against the army for these unspeakable human rights violations. The Colombian government, of course, claims that most of these cases were actually rebels but I think they are lying. I am so angry about this that I actually going to write a letter to my Congressmen and Senators urging them to end Plan Colombia and demand an international investigation with prosecutions of all those involved. I don't think that this will actually do anything but I don't want to feel powerless in light of these crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of the holy drug war.