BOLIVIA: We Have Explosive

I´M AT: The Koala Den, owned and run by Koala Tours, who'd booked everyone staying there onto the same tour, leaving at the same time on the same day, and were still unprepared for everyone descending on the breakfast at once. Suitably Bolivian.

Cerro Rico is a huge mountain that used to be full of silver, and which provided the Spaniards with a great bulk of the wealth with which they built their country's infrastructure.

It's only full of zinc and tin ad other powdery spectres now, so the miners aren't living in the style to which they were formerly accustomed. In truth, it's absolutely horrifying that men can still work in hot, dusty, poisonous conditions without masks or proper equipment, risking death by explosion each day and certain death from silicosis after twenty or so years.

One guy worked in the dark because he had to save the money he would otherwise use to buy batteries for his head torch. He was 35, had the body of a 15 year old, but the face of Methuselah. He worked with hammer and chisel to make the holes in which he poked dynamite. Each hole would take hours and hours to chip away at, and he'd have absolutely no idea whether he'd blow out anything apart from rock. He worked on his own, whilst his son, 15 years old, worked in a co-operative in another part of the mine, for which he received more security but less financial reward, as all risks and profits were shared. If our man in the dark found a seam of silver, he and his future generations would be made for life.

So we choked and heaved and hauled our soft arses through the hill, learning as we went from Pedro Negro, a fantastic guy who also used to work in the mines but now earnt less doing these tours. Some of the miners earn as much as lawyers or doctors. There were thousands of lawyers in the town itself, for some reason, perhaps to settle ownership disputes, as the mine is completely unregulated. You or I could walk in there tomorrow and start blowing bits out of it, and this would be easy, as dynamite is available over the counter.

After emerging from the tour, and as a relief from all the tension and exhaustion that we suffered down the mines - oh, how we suffered - we assembled and detonated a big stick of pale green dynamite wrapped in ammonium sulphide.

And may I say, it damn near knocked the Pimms out of my pinkies.