Salty Salar de Uyuni

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From Potosi we made our way to Uyuni, quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Luckily the loperamide held out and I managed to make it to the Salt Flats relatively unscathed. On the way we saw a train graveyard: Uyuni used to be the major stop off for all trains carrying the minerals from Potosi to Antofagasta (now in Chile but used to be Bolivia´s major port before losing it in the Pacific War), and was the place to get your engine repaired. There are lots of British engineering relics around here too. It was very strange seeing rusting girders imprinted with "Dudley, England" in the middle of the Bolivian Altiplano. There was also a train which Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed for its miners payroll.
The Salar de Uyuni is one of the biggest salt flats in the world, covering 12,000 square km at about 3600 m above sea level. It is a weird sight, looking out over a wide expanse of white. It looks like snow at a distance, but up close it is crusty and different colours. At its thinnest it is only a couple of cm thick, but in the middle it is up to 12 m thick so you can drive 4wd vehicles in the right places. It is a leftover from the floor of the Pacific Ocean and was pushed up many (1000s or 1000000s cant remember!) years ago. The salt is farmed and these are the strange looking pyramids you can see.
We visited a slat hotel and Isla de PEscada, covered in cacti. I managed a little barbecued llama for lunch, yum. We then drove to a volcano (whose name I cant remember) where indigenous families still live. After a little hike to see mummified remains in a cave we stayed on the Salar for sunset, which, I have to admit probably beats all the sunsets I have seen so far here. As soon as the sun went down, it got incredibly cold, so we hoofed it back to Uyuni and to prepare for the madness that is La Paz.

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