The Highest And The Darkest...

Rambles and Shambles 6

The highest human settlement in the world is 5,100 meters above sea level. Now let me tell you that’s high. I’m talking “bring your cans of oxygen” high.

I’m talking dizzy from hypoxia high…so you have to be careful.

It sits nestled in the Peruvian Andes perched right at the foot of a brilliant glacier, Auchita, and the place is…beautiful…dangerous…seemingly almost unlivable from a lack of oxygen…

…but housing between 30,000 to 60,000 people. That’s a small city.

La Rinconada.

A sea of trash surrounds and permeates the city, as there is NO trash service. No running water. No plumbing.

Human and animal feces alike, adorn the ragged and muddy unpaved roads. Drunk miners stumble down the streets.

Underage prostitution, fighting, killing, drugs, and crime…

…this city bustles with violence and crime. It’s damn near lawless.

All because of the gold.

La Rinconada is like some kind of throwback to an old California Gold Rush town, dangerous and exciting. And to anyone who’s never been there, all together foreign and sinister. Straight out of 1848.

In the early 2000s the price of gold started spiking, and the population of this former small mining town increased exponentially from just a thousand or so…to tens of thousands…

…all looking to strike it rich.

Corporación Ananea is the main mining company there and they operate under a “cachorreo” system. Basically that means, the miners work 30 days free for the company, so that they can work 1 day for themselves.

On this one day, the miners are allowed to take as much ore as they can carry. Whether or not any of that ore has gold in it? That’s all up to chance.

So essentially, they are kind of like slaves. More or less. Risking their lives daily for the chance to get lucky.

No women are allowed to work in the mines. However, you can find them outside sifting through the discarded ore…

…hoping to find a few scraps of gold.

They call these women, pallaqueras (gold pickers.)

I’ve never been to this hell hole. La Rinconada.

Websurfing.

I only just learned about it last night, as I combed the internet, looking for something.

Have you ever done that?

Just combed the internet, searching for something?

Something interesting. I have.

Back in the 90’s we used to call that “websurfing…”

I guess some habits die hard. Because I still do that.

For me, that “something interesting” many times is a strange place I’ve never been to or heard of.

Last night…

It was La Rinconada.

And listen, when I find something like this…I tend to go far deeper down the rabbit hole than most people.

I’m the guy who watches all the deleted scenes and special features on the DVD. I’m the guy who runs to YouTube and finds every scrap I can find about something.

I’m the guy who when someone tells a story about some weird dream they had, I have questions about the environment or the strangers they encountered.

It’s a weird thing.

I just want to know. Sometimes it drives my wife crazy. People don’t understand why I want to know all the details about everything.

However…

…I am an email marketer. I’m a businessman. And in my line of work? That kind of thing is a super power.

About Thomas Muller.

Last night I found a website built by a guy named Thomas J. Muller who had been to La Rinconada in 1998. He wrote of the town then:

In 1998 I returned to La Rinconada in Puno, where in previous years we tried to organize a miners union together with the National Federation of Miners of Peru, and a Social Photography Workshop (TAFOS). A sort of last station in someone’s life, a lawless place, without a way out. The wildest place I have ever seen in a time without wars. People living there desperately are mostly homeless youths wanted for justice. All have in common that the last thing they have left to lose is life itself.

It is considered the highest town in the world, located at 5,000 m.a.s.l. At the time, thirty thousand people lived in La Rinconada (today there are seventy thousand). Houses are made of corrugated metal sheets, they lack potable water or a drainage system; sewage waste runs through an open gutter between roads without asphalt. To this day there is no sanitary service, solid waste mixes with human waste and accumulates in and on the outskirts of the town. The smell is sickening.

Temperatures rise slightly above 0ºC, but go down to 25ºC at night. They are only protected by thin corrugated metal sheets, without heating. They keep warm with liquor; there are also prostitutes -usually under age- and their faith is that abundant gold will be found in the mines, located a few hundred meters above the town.

At the mines, tunnels drilled in the ice of Ananea Glaciers are not the average height of a person.

To complete the disastrous life for miners and marketers, together with their wives and children, everything is contaminated with mercury, the air, dirt and walls. Many families burn amalgam containing mercury with gold in their kitchens, where the cooled mercury drips on food, clothes and beds.

Very interesting article, and you can find the original here (check it out…)

Thomas Muller’s experience in La Rinconada

That part where he says, “everything is contaminated with mercury, the air, dirt and walls...”

I find that pretty chilling.

A Dark And Dismal Place.

But that was the other thing I didn’t mention about this place. All the water is contaminated with mercury.

Years of mining for gold and using liquid mercury to separate the smaller pieces from the soil…

…has the whole town's water supply, along with all the surrounding lakes completely contaminated with mercury.

Essentially…

…La Rinconada seems like a place that was never meant for large numbers of people.

Between the trash, the crime, the violence, the contaminated water supply…

Man…it just seems like such a horrible place to be. And I sit here at my computer, typing this message to you, thinking about how…

There might be 3,879 miles from where I am to that place but…

It might as well be an entire galaxy of planets, suns and everything in between, because that place? It’s nothing like where I live. I mean it.

The contrast can be disconcerting when you think about it.

But I find it ironic that the highest human settlement on the entire planet…

…is such a dark and dismal place.

Key West.

It reminds me of a friend of mine. She wanted to go to Key West in the worst way. Saved for a few years until she had enough money to move down there.

And during those years, I remember her talking about this place. Putting it on a pedestal. Kind of mythologizing it. And when they day came to leave…

…she was so excited. Her and her husband were heading down to Key West to start their new life.

It lasted a couple of years. They broke up, and she came back to Ohio. Said she was glad to be back here.

Said that Key West wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The salt got all over everything. You have to take bridges everywhere. It was too bright. Too “touristy.”

I guess things aren’t always what you think they are going to be.

Like the highest city in the world, La Rinconada.

Not all you might think it would be.

The Point.

Online business can be like that.

When I first got started, I thought it was going to be kicking back on beaches sippin’ chilled beverages. Letting that money roll in. Swimming through my fat stacks in the vault like Scrooge McDuck.

Yeah, baby!

But that was over a decade ago. What I figured out was that success was the journey not the destination.

Ambition won’t let you be happy. Not really.

You are always on to the next thing. Chasing something. Searching. Hat is what it means to be an entrepreneur to me.

At my happiest on the hunt for the next thing. In the middle of the next project. On the road to overcoming the next obstacle. And wrapping it up in a nice little story for those who come after me.

That’s a funny thing. But it is what it is.

Not the storybook ending we were sold in all those happy endings from the fairy tale books or the Guru of the Month sales letters with all that glorious future pacing…

…I mean…I don’t remember any future pacing that told me I was going to be on an eternal hamster wheel of learning and working.

Sure I love what I do…but yeah…I wouldn't have thought the “journey was the thing.” It sounds kind of anti-climatic to me, lol. Like that part in King Fu Panda when he opens the Dragon Scroll and it’s blank. It’s like mirror.

The message was “he was all he needed to succeed.” But it felt like a jip.

So when I say the journey is the thing, I am fully aware that sounds like a jip…

…like those poor bastards who trek it up to oxygen starved La Rinconada to risk their lives working for free an entire month for just one day of HOPE that they might find some of that precious ore to take home…

But…in my case? That’s what it is. The truth. The unadulterated truth.

So to wrap this up with some obvious advice?

It’s like Mark Twain said over a 150 years ago:

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.''

Just some thoughts for you. I hope you are having an awesome Friday.

That’s all I got!

Kam