Before Christi and I depart Potosi, we just have time to visit the eclectic Casa Real de la Moneda, the former mint and now a museum. The mandatory tour begins with art from the colonial era, which is held in exquisite timber-beamed rooms with stone arches. The most famous painting housed here is La Virgen del Cerro (thought to be the work of an unknown indigenous artist). The canvas recounts the history, cruelty, power and symbolism of Cerro Rico.
The tour then switches gears and focuses on the process of minting the silver extracted from Cerro Rico into coins. The silver coins and ingots produced in Potosi were shipped by land and sea to Panama and eventually taken to Spain aboard Spanish treasure fleets for use throughout its empire. Modern day Bolivia, by contrast, no longer produces its own coins and notes – it being cheaper to import them from France, Canada, and irony of ironies, Spain.
The tour finishes on a rather somber note with a collection of military artifacts (from the Spanish Conquest to 20th century munitions) and, even more disturbing, a display of mummified babies. Surely these guys deserve a decent Christian (or animist) burial.
We leave Potosi on sealed road aboard a soft class Emperador bus. Half the passengers are tourists, the other half are indigenous Aymara who prefer to keep their huge bundles with them rather than stowing them in the hold of the bus (probably wise). Once outside the city, the road quickly becomes a building site as serious repairs and upgrades are in full swing. The bus driver manages the conditions heroically, successfully negotiating all manner of diversions, sand heaps, steep gradients, llamas, and other vehicles. During the odd moments when the dust settles, the scenery is actually breathtaking: crumbling shale and eroded sandstone lead to some dramatic rock formations that stand out against the bleak Altiplano. Equally dramatic are the dark, claustrophobic clouds that bear down on the wild plateau promising rain that never materializes. The altiplano sunset is stunning, which restores our sagging spirits as we finally reach Uyuni – a city in the middle of nowhere – after six long, grubby hours.
Blog post by Roderick Phillips, author of Weary Heart – a gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching, laugh-wrenching ride
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