High Altitude Can Go Fuck Itself

La Paz sits at 3, 650 meters elevation as the highest capital city in the world. Potosi is 4, 090 meters in the sky. Lake Titicaca is apparently the world's highest lake at 3, 811, and if you climb the hill overlooking the lakeside town of Copacabana you’ll be gasping for breath a lot higher up than that. Most of Bolivia is basically in the clouds. It makes it all sound appealing and somewhat romantic, but what they fail to mention is how hard to breathe it is up there.

They’re at similar heights to ski resorts, but ski resorts are in alpine regions, with only fresh snow, trees and clean, crisp air in the immediate environment. Bolivia's cities in the heavens instead provide suffocating exhaust fumes and the smell of fresh garbage being blown about in the strong winds. The extra effort that needs to be made with each breath means an extra intake of pollution into your lungs.

La Paz is an infinite procession of mini-vans roaming the streets and collecting passengers to ferry them around the city. None of them seem to have ever been serviced and black smoke billows from each one as it grunts up and down the steep, narrow streets. Among the vans are larger buses and trucks that also look like they’re from the seventies as eco-friendly vehicles have not yet made it to Bolivia. The fumes go with you when walking up the stepped footpaths, and punch you in the face when going down. The only respite comes from the city block sized town squares, but then you have to dodge the filthy pigeon feathers being blown at you as you stand hunched, hands on knees, panting for air.

Even climbing into a bunk bed, or rolling over as I struggled to sleep would get my heart beating a little faster than it should have been as it searched for oxygen. All over the Andes, through Bolivia to Peru countless tourists suffer from altitude sickness after underestimating its impact and overestimating their own resilience.

Potosi – the highest city in the world, once Latin America’s wealthiest city and home to the Potosi silver mines – was an attack on the senses. A mixture of piss, rotting fruit and dog shit. It had the same wind as deserts have, but this was more than just dust and sand being blown at you as you struggled up the narrow sidewalks.

The reason for visiting Potosi, and the only reason I could imagine anyone would go there, is to tour the silver mines where visitors are given a personal experience of the conditions the miners have to work in. My initial excitement about visiting it was because I had been told tourists could buy dynamite there and set it off in the mines. This didn't happen - the dynamite we purchased was given to a miner who just put it in his pocket - but regardless it was worth the visit, if only for the experience. The streets of Potosi seemed bad, but after ten minutes in the tunnels I couldn’t wait to get back outside. In some sections the temperature rested above 50 degrees Celsius as miners shoveled and transported mountains of loose rock in search of silver that would pay for their shifts of up to 14 hours or more. It was stifling, the dust attacked lungs and the darkness, deep into the mines far away from daylight, took away any sense of day or night. Miners worked whenever they wanted, day or night, it made no difference. The conditions would have been brutal at sea level, the altitude and all the difficulties that come with it just made it cruel.

It made me think of times when I've had to wait a few hours for a bus, or had no hot water in a shower and had a bit of a moan about it thinking 'fuck my life.' After crawling through the tunnels and spending five minutes helping the miners move bags of rubble in the small, dark, hot and stuffy caves, I figured I shouldn't ever complain about anything ever again. Except maybe high altitude.