Potosi - silver mining town

Next stop in our travel across Bolivia was in Potosi - a silver mining town very rich hundreds of years ago but is now one of the poorest towns in Bolivia. The main attraction is a visit into the existing silver mine - a REAL experience of a third world country.
We started with getting our mining overalls, and then headed to the mining "market area". Here you can buy dynamite and ammonium nitrate, apparently only for sale to miners who buy this on their way to work - but i didnt see any control of this at all. So, as you do, we bought some dynamite to blow up a cake that one of the guys had bought for an experiement. We headed to the mines and standing about 20m away (under control of our miner guide) they blew up the cake - an incredible experience watching this cake getting blown to pieces up but quite a strong feeling from the shock waves! After this we headed inside them mine for a tour lasting about an hour ... needless to say we were quite happy to be back out afterwards!

Looking good ..

With the dynamite and ammonium nitrate

Cake ready to explode

After the "controlled" explosion

Inside the mine